


Idylls of the King

by marginaliana



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Arthurian mythology - Freeform, Lee wasn't a Kingsman, M/M, Quests, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-16
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-07-28 08:02:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7631746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/pseuds/marginaliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eggsy Unwin is a respectable bloke with a job at a garage who has been raising his sister ever since his mum and Dean were killed in the SIM card massacre a few years back. When he takes four year old Daisy to a local medieval faire, however, he finds himself embroiled in a new life and a quest to discover something that has long been lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AnnaofAza](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaofAza/gifts).



By the time they saw the banner advertising the sword in the stone, Eggsy was exhausted. 

He and Daisy had been at the faire all day – she'd been so excited that she'd woken up even before sunrise, so they'd caught the early train and arrived just as it opened. Over the course of the day they'd seen more than he ever thought possible: strolling musicians, knights in gleaming armor jousting on horseback, dancers in pairs or in groups all twirling and twisting around each other, beautiful women in elaborate dresses, beautiful _men_ in tights that left Eggsy's eyes bulging, archers, yarn spinners, artists, jugglers (including three blokes juggling fire, which made Eggsy think he might like to give it a go, actually – it might impress the lads on a Friday night at the Black Prince, and impressing the lads was pretty much the only excitement he had left these days). The variety was endless; it was almost too much, too overwhelming, and several times he wished himself home again – but then again there was the warm weight of Daisy's hand in his own, the huge, delighted smile stretched across her little face, and that was enough to keep him where he was.

He loved her so fucking much, was the thing. As far as Eggsy was concerned, Dean Baker had only managed to do two good things in his life: 1) making Daisy, and 2) kicking off (along with about 6 million other people) back when the whole thing with the SIM cards went down a few years ago. He'd lost his mum then, too, and been left to raise Daisy on his own… but though he missed his mum and occasionally dreamed of a life more glamorous than working in a garage and playing tea party twice a week, he couldn't find it in himself to regret how things had turned out. Daisy was everything. 

″Eggsy, _look_ ,″ she said, and he startled out of his tired thoughts. He barely had time to follow the line of her pointed finger before she was dragging him over in the direction of the tent.

Above the opening a banner read 'The Sword in the Stone' and then underneath, in smaller letters, 'You could be the chosen one!' It looked pretty slick, actually, like it'd been made by a professional instead of a bloke in a shed, and the tent was made out of some plush purple fabric that glinted as it moved in the wind. More to the point, the queue was lined with benches, and so it was a relief to join it, at least on Eggsy's part. He sat, and let Daisy chatter on as he rested his aching feet. 

By the time they reached the head of the queue Daisy was well into proving her extensive knowledge of every single song from the Disney movie. The faire was clearly winding down – no one had joined the queue behind them, and Eggsy could see people beginning to move towards the way out as he heaved himself back to his feet and entered the tent.

Inside were two people – one a bald man dressed in a long robe of deep purple, even darker than the tent fabric, and the other a knight in gleaming armor, though the knight wore no helmet and had her hair drawn back into a long ponytail. 

This wasn't the first female knight they'd seen, but the others had been all on horseback, jousting or performing demonstrations. Daisy stopped singing 'Mad Madam Mim' abruptly at the sight of her. ″A girl knight!″ she squealed, and dropped Eggsy's hand to run over to her; Eggsy lunged after, but he was tired and slow and she was hugging the knight around the knees before he could stop her.

″It's all right,″ the knight said to him, and then, to Daisy, ″You want to be a knight, sweetheart? I think you can do it. I mean, you look pretty strong. I bet you can even lift up your dad.″

Daisy giggled. ″He's my _brother_ ,″ she said. ″And I can't lift him. He weighs a billion tons!″

″Oh, ta,″ Eggsy said, under his breath. The bald man snorted. 

″Well, maybe when you grow up a bit bigger,″ the knight said. ″What's your name, sweetheart?″ 

″Daisy.″

″We haven't had a knight called Daisy yet, so maybe you can be the first,″ said the knight. ″Do you want to try with the sword?″

Eggsy had almost forgotten about the sword. When he swung around to look at it, he found it was rather less glamorous than he might have imagined – the sword itself was tarnished silver, and though there were carvings across the hilt they'd been worn smooth with time. It looked like a sword someone might've actually used. The stone wasn't much to look at, either; it was basically just a lump of rock, almost the color of concrete. Still, the sword was taller than Daisy was, and Eggsy watched with a certain amount of alarm as she lifted her arms above her head, grabbed the hilt, and heaved.

Nothing happened. Eggsy wasn't quite sure what he had expected, but he still breathed a sigh of relief that turned into a hastily stifled laugh as Daisy frowned and whined in the back of her throat and yanked at it even harder. ″Daisy, luv,″ he said, ″I don't think that's gonna...″ He let the sentence trail off when she gave up, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at the thing like it was a naughty puppy.

″Stupid sword,″ she said.

″You know, luv, I think 'Sir Daisy' would'a sounded a bit silly anyway,″ Eggsy said. 

Daisy gave him a look and promptly ignored the statement. ″Now you try,″ she said firmly.

″Ah,″ Eggsy said, and then, ″right, right.″ He crossed the three paces to the stone and dropped one hand to the hilt and tugged, fully prepared to enact a dramatic failure – 

And with a defiant ring, the sword slid free from the stone.


	2. Chapter 2

″Are you taking the piss?″ Eggsy said.

They were sitting behind the tent, in a small RV that was posher inside than it had any right to be. Down at the far end, the knight was teaching Daisy a couple of self-defense moves; it was deeply adorable, and Eggsy would have been enjoying the sight immensely but for the fact that the bald man – 'Merlin' he called himself, for fuck's sake – had just spent ten minutes spinning him a long and improbable tale of knights and spies and magical artifacts passed down from generation to generation. 

″Son, I haven't taken the piss since before you were born,″ Merlin said dryly, and then, at Eggsy's roll of the eyes, ″I can assure you that I am entirely serious.″

″You're telling me King Arthur was real, and all them other knights too, and all of that...″ Eggsy flapped a hand. ″...that mystical shit?″

Merlin pinched the bridge of his nose. ″Indeed.″

The whole idea was ridiculous. And yet… and yet the sword was _humming_ under his hand. It had been dingy-looking back in the tent, like it'd been abandoned under a tarp in the corner of a shed for ages. But the second his hand had touched it, it had begun to gleam with cold light. Even in the yellow glow of the RV's lamps it glittered white. His hand was tingling where it curved around the hilt and there was something wordless being whispered into his ear, not quite a chant but not quite a tune, either. 

″All right,″ Eggsy said at last. ″Let's say I believe you, for the moment. You're part of a secret spy organization descended from King Arthur and you save the world on the regular and you got all kinds of supernatural wotsit hanging about just to make the job a little easier. Great. Well done. What's that got to do with me?″

″You pulled the sword from the stone, lad,″ said Merlin. ″Isn't it obvious?″

Eggsy sputtered. ″You can't mean you want me to be Arthur!″

″Excalibur does,″ said Merlin. 

″Oh yes,″ Eggsy said, ″the _sword_ wants it. Of course it bloody does.″

″I understand this may come as a shock to you,″ Merlin began.

″What are you going to tell me next, that the fucking holy grail wants me to take over as head of Manchester United?″

Something sour passed across Merlin's face. ″The grail went missing in nineteen ninety four,″ he said sharply. ″Otherwise I'd suggest that you ask it yourself.″

″Okay, that was _supposed_ to be sarcastic,″ Eggsy said. ″I didn't think you'd've actually got the fucking holy grail, what the fuck?″ He ran a hand through his hair. Merlin said nothing, perhaps guessing that Eggsy wasn't quite ready for any more revelations. ″Why me?″ Eggsy said finally. ″I mean, I got a job, I'm not some bum, but I ain't nothing special.″

″Honestly, lad? I don't know. I don't think anyone does. The sword...″ Merlin shrugged. ″It's the sword. It chooses as it will. None of the previous Arthurs have wanted to put anything on the record about why.″

″And it's never gone wrong? Picked the wrong person?″

″No,″ Merlin said, but there was something about his eyes that made Eggsy think he looked a bit uncomfortable with the question. Before he could press, Merlin said briskly, ″Look, it's getting late. Go home and think it over tonight. Tomorrow I can show you our headquarters, introduce you to the other knights, answer any questions you may have.″

Eggsy hesitated. ″All right,″ he said eventually. It was mad, completely mad, but he had to admit to being curious. Especially if there really was a secret spy organization. ″I got to work, but I can come by after 6 if I can bring Daisy.″ He stood and held out the sword, but Merlin shook his head.

″It's yours now,″ he said. ″Won't stand for anyone else handling it.″ He opened a drawer and pulled out a long piece of leather – after a moment Eggsy recognized it as a scabbard.

″I ain't gonna look half mad, going home on the train like this,″ he said, but he threaded the scabbard onto his belt and slid the sword into it. Once his hand was no longer touching it the whispering hum in the back of his mind died back to almost nothing, though he could tell it was still there if he concentrated. 

″Here's the address,″ Merlin said, handing him a slip of paper and clapping him on the back with the other hand. Eggsy tucked it into his pocket without looking at it.

″C'mon, Daisy,″ he said. ″We gotta go, sweetheart.″

Daisy whined a little but left off punching the air and came, more or less obediently. ″Can Miss Roxy teach me more tomorrow?″ she said.

The knight caught his eye. ″That's my real name,″ she said. ″Roxy. And I'd be happy to show her more, if it's all right.″

″Probably good for her to know how to defend herself,″ Eggsy allowed. ″We'll see tomorrow.″ They said their goodnights and stepped out of the RV into the warm summer evening. 

Eggsy let Daisy babble on as they walked to the station, making noises at the appropriate moments but mostly trying to figure out how to make sense of literally anything that had happened to him in the last hour and a half. Then when they sat down on the train she was out like a light and he was left alone with his thoughts, which ought to have been an improvement but really, really wasn't.

An hour after that they were home; Daisy stayed sacked out, so Eggsy carried her in on his hip – the one that didn't have a great big sword hanging off it – and put her to bed, then fell into bed himself without bothering to do more than change into his pajamas. 

By the time his eyes slid closed, he still had no answers.

\-----

His feet crunched softly in the grass. Ahead of him rose a circle of standing stones, pitted with age and pale in the morning sunlight. They looked solid, though one of the stones had fallen inwards. Above them the sky was clear and empty, the sun a faint warmth off to Eggsy's left, just beginning to rise above the horizon. He turned a slow circle and saw only fields stretching endlessly in every direction. When he stopped moving the silence closed in, so thick that it was almost a sound in itself.

Then, abruptly, the silence was broken by a soft 'woof' noise. Eggsy looked down as a small dog barreled out from between two of the stones. 

Eggsy knelt and held out a hand for the dog to sniff. ″Hullo, little guy,″ he said. He scratched the dog's head, then slid his hand down to the collar underneath the shaggy fur and flipped the tag over. ″Mr. Pickle,″ he read, and snorted with laughter.

The dog woofed again and licked Eggsy's hand, then turned and trotted back towards the stones. For lack of anything better to do Eggsy followed him, but when he came into the inside of the circle he nearly tripped as he found that it wasn't empty.

″Whoa, sorry, mate,″ he said, but the man standing there didn't move, didn't even turn his head or lower the hands that were reached out in front of him, and after a moment Eggsy realized it wasn't because the man was deliberately ignoring him but rather that he was… frozen. Almost like he was just another one of the standing stones, man-shaped instead of square.

Eggsy walked around him to get a better look. The man was elegantly if somewhat incongruously dressed in a grey suit with pale pinstripes; Eggsy didn't know much about suits, but he figured this one probably cost more than he earned in a month at the garage. On the man it looked natural, stylish but comfortable. But it was his face that really caught Eggsy's attention – the man's dark brown eyes were anguished and his eyebrows furrowed into an expression of such pain that Eggsy nearly recoiled. Had the man been smiling, he would certainly have been attractive, with a dimpled chin and hair silvering and curling at the temples in a way that seemed almost to glimmer. As it was, Eggsy found himself wishing he could smooth away the wrinkles in the man's brow, ease the tense line of his shoulders. 

″Woof,″ said Mr. Pickle again. 

Eggsy looked down and discovered the little dog laying on top of the man's feet, nose mournfully nudging his left shoe. ″Yeah,″ he said, almost unknowingly. ″Yeah.″ He hesitated a moment, then reached up, half thinking to see if the man was cold to the touch. 

But before the touch could connect, Eggsy woke in his bed, in the dark, blinking up at the shadowed ceiling. _Huh, weird,_ he thought. But on the scale of Weird Shit That Had Happened To Eggsy In The Last Twenty Four Hours, this, honestly, barely registered, so after a moment he rolled over and went promptly back to sleep.

\-----

It was Monday, so Eggsy dropped Daisy at school and went to work, though it was a struggle to keep his mind on changing oil and running inspections when the sword was still whispering to him from where it was wrapped in an old hoodie and stuffed in his backpack which hung on a hook behind the office door. 

He spent his lunch break reading Wikipedia entries about King Arthur and the knights on his phone, which left him feeling daunted and, despite himself, intrigued. It was the idea of being part of something important, something good – his brief stint with the Marines had been born from the same impulse, though in the end he'd had to cut it short when his mum told him she was pregnant and begged him to come home. He'd gone, then, because he'd known too much about Dean to trust the man with a pregnant woman or a baby; he'd resented it, too – resented his mum's carelessness and the baby's existence right up until the moment he'd laid eyes on Daisy for the first time… and then that was it, really. 

Everything he'd done since was for her – getting his job, keeping his temper in the face of Dean and his gang of goons and his mum's waxing and waning interest in the baby, and then after the SIM cards massacre becoming her parent full time, arranging school and play dates and doctor's visits, cutting back the time with his friends, cutting back his drinking. 

He'd told himself that taking care of her was enough. If he could just do this, just bring her up right, it would count as doing something good for the world.

Mostly, he'd even believed it. But now, to be offered the chance to be a spy, a literal knight of the round table… a chance to save the world.

Yeah, he wanted it. Maybe more than he should.

\-----

After work, Eggsy picked Daisy up from her nursery and took her for a quick dinner before they headed for the address Merlin had given him. The map on his phone led Eggsy to a posh tailor's over on Saville Row, and he let out a low whistle at the sight of all the prim suits in the window. Still, he'd come this far, and after a moment to screw up his nerve he pulled open the door, ushering Daisy in first but holding her hand just in case she took it into her head to touch something with mysteriously sticky fingers.

Inside it was even more spectacular than the glimpse he'd got through the window, as much a variety as the faire had been, in its own way. If he had nothing better to do – and if he wouldn't have spent every second feeling, as now, woefully out of place – Eggsy might have liked to stand for a while just taking it all in, letting the different fabrics brush against his palm or the back of his hand just to see what they felt like. 

His hands were probably as sticky as Daisy's. 

Eggsy gave his name to the man behind the counter. Merlin appeared a moment later – thankfully not in that mad purple robe but in a jumper and khakis – and showed them into what looked like a fitting room. After closing the door he pressed his hand to the corner of the mirror and the whole room slid downwards like a lift. ″Whoa!″ said Daisy. Merlin caught Eggsy's eye and raised a smug eyebrow at him; Eggsy just nodded back, reluctantly impressed.

The lift took them to an underground hallway; there were several rooms leading off it and Eggsy would dearly have liked to examine them, but Merlin carried on down to the end of the hall and into a waiting area that turned out to be a miniature train station, complete with a four-seater train car. The whole place absolutely screamed money, and Eggsy found himself shrinking even further into his secondhand jacket and worn trackies. Excalibur was still tucked into his backpack, but he thought he could hear it whispering a little louder in here than at the garage, as if something about the place amplified it.

Merlin informed them that the ride would take about forty five minutes, so Eggsy got Daisy settled with a coloring book. When she was scribbling away happily at last, he sat back in his seat and said, ″Right. I been thinking, and to tell the truth I still ain't sure about all of this. Tell me more about what you do. Not that mythic shi— uh, stuff.″ He gave Daisy a quick glance, but she was intent on choosing a crayon and didn't seem to have noticed his slip up. ″What you actually do.″

″A fair enough request,″ Merlin said. He hesitated a moment, then began, ″We have traditionally dealt with the out of the ordinary sort of crime. Not street level crime or even bank robbery but the sort of crime that most people don't ever see. We handle the men at the top. The issue might be drugs, it might be weapons, it might be financial. It might be… things that are otherwise unsavory.″ Eggsy nodded to show both that he understood the implication and that he was appreciative of Merlin being mindful of Daisy's presence. ″Occasionally we run across someone who has invented a new sort of technology but isn't inclined to use it wisely.″

 _'Genius nutcases,'_ Eggsy mentally translated.

″In such cases we help them to make better choices or we confiscate the technology. Or both.″

_Which means, 'we hit them until they stop,' I'm guessing._

″Really,″ said Merlin, ″the variety is endless. It simply depends on what needs to be done.″

″And what does Arthur actually do? Am I gonna be usin' this sword a lot?″

″Not necessarily. Arthur—″ Merlin hesitated briefly. ″Your predecessor preferred diplomacy to action.″

″If you need _that_ kind o' thing, you are barking up the wrong tree, mate,″ said Eggsy.

″We don't need you to be anything but yourself,″ Merlin said firmly. ″In many ways the job can be what you make of it – fieldwork or no fieldwork, overseeing the details yourself or delegating them as you see fit. What we really need is someone to lead us. Someone to set our priorities, to choose which jobs we take and which we leave to others, to choose where we are to spend our money and time.″

Eggsy tugged uncomfortably at his collar. ″You make it sound like it's all about… power.″

″Aye, lad,″ Merlin said. ″It is. And wouldn't you like to be the one to have that power?'

Ten years ago he would have fallen all over himself to say yes to that. But now? With four years under his belt of being the only one Daisy could depend on?

″I dunno,″ he said. ″I really don't know.″

″Maybe _that's_ why Excalibur chose you,″ said Merlin quietly.

\-----

Eggsy stewed about that for a bit, then asked Merlin for an example of Kingsman's work, something exciting. Merlin obliged by recounting a tale of how a knight named Gawain had sneaked into a museum under cover of a charity gala, and the rest of the trip passed more or less enjoyably.

When they arrived at the other end – to a ridiculously huge manor house that had been turned into a _secret base_ , for fuck's sake – Merlin had someone waiting to take temporary care of Daisy. Eggsy bristled at the presumption but ultimately he had to admit it was probably a good idea; if they were going to talk, frankly, about what being in a secret spy organization actually involved, it probably required some separation from little ears. He subjected the woman, Elaine, to a brief but thorough questioning, then let Daisy do the same before he allowed them to go off together. He half expected Daisy to throw a fit – she didn't much like being told she couldn't go with him and he generally found it easier to bring her along than fight about it.

But apparently the novelty of seeing where Miss Roxy worked and maybe trying on some armor of her very own – Eggsy didn't know whether they'd managed to get four-year-old-sized armor made in less than twenty four hours or whether they had some just lying around, and he wasn't sure he wanted to know – was enough to make her biddable; she dismissed Eggsy with a bright, ″Okay, bye now!″ and began dragging Miss Elaine towards the door without so much as a backwards glance.

Eggsy shook his head and turned to follow Merlin down an entirely different hallway. When they reached the end there was a large, imposing oak door. Merlin tugged it open; Eggsy followed him in, then stopped dead in his tracks. 

It was the kind of room he'd only ever seen in movies – wood paneling and plush carpet and paintings of old dudes hung all along the walls. There was a long table, polished to an impossible shine, stretching down the middle of the room, and sat around it was a regiment of men in suits. Some tall, some short, but all of them as well-built and straight-backed as the chairs they sat in. The only woman was Lancelot, third from the left, but even she was dressed in a suit and sitting almost to attention. As if none of them had even been talking, just sitting there in silence waiting for him to turn up.

Eggsy's heart began to race as Merlin indicated he should sit in the seat at the head of the table. ″I ain't agreed to this yet,″ he said. 

″Aye, we know that,″ Merlin said, with a hint of exasperation. ″It's a chair, not a commitment. I just want to introduce you.″

With some trepidation, Eggsy sat. Lancelot – Roxy – was giving him an encouraging glance; some of the others looked decidedly less pleased, though he couldn't tell if that was due to his reluctance or just the fact of who he was. What he was.

″These are the Kingsmen,″ Merlin said, taking the other empty seat at his right hand. ″Percival. Gawain. Lancelot you've met.″ He indicated each with a finger as he named them. ″Lamorak. Bors. Kay. Gareth. Bedivere. Tristan. Geraint. Caradoc. Ector. Pelleas.″

Eggsy frowned. ″No Galahad?″ he asked. His hasty research hadn't been too useful when it came to Kingsman specifically but it'd at least given him enough background that he thought he knew what he ought to expect, mythology-wise. Of the traditional knights, Galahad had seemed, by far, the most badass – Eggsy had rather been looking forward to meeting whoever it was that carried the name.

The atmosphere of the room went even colder than it had been.

″He's dead,″ Merlin said shortly, and then, more gently, ″We'll need to find a suitable candidate for that position as well, but we can't do that without an Arthur.″

″Sorry,″ Eggsy said lamely.

″It's all right,″ Merlin said, though it clearly wasn't. ″You weren't to know.″ He cleared his throat. ″Gentlemen, lady, Mr. Eggsy Unwin.″

Eggsy didn't think he'd ever had himself actually _announced_ before, other than perhaps the occasional shout of 'Oi, look who's turned up now, it's Eggsy fuckin' Unwin.' He wasn't sure he liked it. Still, he managed to give the table a faint nod. 

″I've given you a bit of history about the organization, Eggsy,″ Merlin continued. ″And we've talked a bit about what I think you can do for us. Now I want to talk about what _we_ can do for you.″

″All right,″ Eggsy said warily. Several of the gentlemen leaned forward, which was alarming. Eggsy leaned back in his own chair; most of them got the hint, after that, leaving only the second on his right, Bors, who was clearly the one who had been delegated to open the conversation.

″You'll have the chance to continue your education,″ he said. ″ _Real_ education, not schooling. New skills. Some of them you have already and all we'll have to do is refine them.″

″Like what?″ Eggsy said.

″You can already fight,″ said Bors. ″More to the point, you can move.″

″You make it sound like I'm gonna be doing a lot of dancing, mate.″ He watched Geraint and Bedivere exchange a glance, which probably meant he wasn't too far off the mark. ″What else've you got?″

″It will give you the opportunity to make connections with important people,″ said Lamorak.

'Posh wankers,' Roxy mouthed from behind him, and Eggsy stifled a laugh. 

″Not interested,″ he said. ″Next.″

″You can blow things up,″ said Bedivere.

″Tempting,″ Eggsy allowed. ″But I can do that on a Saturday night in Essex, if I've a mind to and I've got ten quid to spare.″

″You'll get to help people,″ said Roxy. The smirk dropped off of Eggsy's face. ″Save lives. Stop killers and terrorists and all the people at the top who step on the people at the bottom. The world needs people who can do something about all of that shit, and one of those people could be you.″

She let him sit with that for a moment – they all did, like a collective held breath. Then, just as he was opening his mouth to shoot back a reply, Merlin said, ″There are advantages for Daisy as well, of course.″ Eggsy shut his mouth involuntarily. ″Better schools,″ Merlin continued, ″smaller class sizes, better after school care. We'll have trained nannies on staff, people she can develop a relationship with. Tutors, if she needs them. A safer place to live, one where she can go outdoors. And if something happens to you, she'll be provided for all her life.″ It was obviously his trump card. 

But that didn't mean it wasn't going to work.

″Fuck you,″ Eggsy said, without heat. He shook his head, then took a deep breath. ″Fine, you got me. I'll do it.″


	3. Chapter 3

Of course they wanted him to start immediately, but it was getting on for Daisy's bedtime so Eggsy talked them down to starting the following day, after he'd had the chance to give up Daisy's nursery place and quit his job at the garage.

″We can handle that for you,″ said Geraint.

″Obviously you ain't ever met a nursery teacher with a grudge,″ Eggsy said. ″And if you think I'm just walkin' out on my boss without a word, you're fucking mental, mate. Look, you're putting me in charge, right? That's the whole idea here?″

They had to admit that it was; Eggsy could see that Bors, in particular, didn't like it.

″Then I'm saying let's wait until tomorrow. After lunch. I'll be even prettier if I've had a lie in, I can promise you.″

At least he managed to get a smile out of a couple of them at that. 

Roxy walked with him to the train, saying nothing when they were alone and then dedicating herself entirely to Daisy's questions once they'd picked her up from the impromptu nursery. Eggsy could tell already that he was going to like her, but he was glad when she left them at the door. And then it was just him and Daisy alone in the train car and he could gather her into his lap, press his face to her hair and breathe in for a long moment.

″Did you have a good time tonight, Daisy luv?″ he asked eventually.

″Yes,″ she said simply. There was a hint of exasperation to her voice, as if the answer ought to have been obvious.

″How'd you feel about living someplace like this? You'd have a bedroom just like at home, you'd have all your toys and your stuffies, but it would be in a new place. You'd have a new nursery, too. Make some new friends.″

She considered that for a long moment. ″Will Miss Roxy be there? And Miss Elaine?″

Eggsy hesitated automatically, trying to think whether this was something he could promise. Then he realized that he didn't have to hesitate. He could just… make it happen. ″Yes,″ he said. ″They'll be there.″

″Okay,″ Daisy said. Eggsy blew out a breath.

″All right, luv,″ he said. ″I guess we're doin' this.″

They took a Kingsman cab back from the shop to the flat. Eggsy hadn't been in a cab in years – they'd never had the money to waste – and he spent most of the ride thinking about what it was going to mean that now he could take one whenever he wanted. 

\-----

Eggsy sucked in a breath as he stepped across the grass, held it in until he reached the first of the standing stones and then let it out in a great heaving whoosh of air. It felt like this was the first time he'd been able to breathe properly in days. The air at the faire had been muggy hot and it was the same at home, after, with no air conditioning. It had been even worse at the garage, filled with the thick scent of oil and burnt rubber. At Kingsman – in the shop and at the manor both – the air had been chilled enough but still, unmoving, so that he'd felt like any moment he might break something just by standing there.

Here, though, there was a soft breeze, cool against his skin and warming faintly in the sunlight. It wasn't quite like being on the council roof at six o'clock on a Sunday morning, but it was close. When Eggsy looked to his left, he thought that the sun was, perhaps, just a little bit higher in the sky than it had been before. 

He stepped into the circle of stones, not entirely sure what he would find. The man was still there, however, locked into the same position as before – standing, hands outstretched as if he had been reaching for something, though there was nothing in front of him but grass and then, about ten feet away, one of the stones. Mr. Pickle was lying at his feet, asleep.

Eggsy turned away and walked the circumference of the circle, holding out the palm of his hand to brush each stone as he went by. Maybe it was peaceful, being stone. It had occurred to him that maybe the man wouldn't _want_ to be unfrozen. Maybe he'd got himself frozen for a reason, or maybe it'd been an accident but now that he was stuck, he'd found he liked it. 

But as he reached the far side of the circle he couldn't help pausing, turning to look at the man's face. The look of pain hadn't eased at all, and now Eggsy thought he could detect a hint of self-loathing in the expression as well. 

″Poor bastard,″ Eggsy said softly. No, he couldn't fool himself into thinking there was anything good about leaving the man like this. He stepped closer, reached up and curled his palm and fingers over one of the man's outstretched hands. It was cold to the touch, colder even than the stones.

Nothing happened. 

Then warmth, blooming under his hand. Pink rising in the man's cheeks, not quite a flush but something more than what had been there already. A breeze ruffled the man's jacket – or was it movement? The faint echo of a heartbeat thrumming in his chest. The man's eyes opened just a fraction of an inch wider; he seemed to see Eggsy – really see him – for the first time. He drew in a breath.

And Eggsy woke to the sound of his alarm.

\-----

He spent the morning first at Daisy's nursery, signing the papers to give up her place and saying goodbye to all of her teachers, spinning his Kingsman-prepared story of a sudden inheritance that came with new flat and a job for him and a nursery placement for Daisy. Then to the garage, where the boys congratulated him raucously and fawned over Daisy while Eggsy and Dave went in the back room to handle the paperwork.

″I'll be fuckin' sorry to lose you,″ Dave said, clapping Eggsy on the shoulder. ″But I'm real glad for you, Eggsy. You're a good man and it's well past time something went right for you.″

For a moment Eggsy's breath caught in his throat. The sword in his backpack felt heavier than ever.

″Now, let me figure out what I owe you, yeah?″ said Dave brusquely.

″Keep it,″ Eggsy blurted. ″You done so much for me and… well, looks like the way things are going I ain't gonna need it so much. So you keep it.″

″I'll give the boys a bonus, on you, how's that?″ Dave said, and they shook on it.

\-----

Eggsy was still feeling off-balance when they arrived at the tailor's. He hadn't been able to reach Ryan or Jamal – Jamal was probably at work at the hospital with his phone off, Ryan in the back room of the warehouse with the radio turned way up – so he left messages for each of them just saying that he was going to be out of touch for a while and he'd check in when he could. He wanted to explain, but he didn't know how much of the truth he could reveal. 

He didn't have the chance to ask, either. Thirty seconds after entering the shop Daisy had been whisked away to Miss Elaine, while Eggsy was led into dressing room two, this time for an actual suit fitting.

It was possibly the worst four hours of his life. He was made to stand still for ages; this, for a man who was used to working in a garage all day, striding around and squatting and bending and lifting, working with his hands, was torture in and of itself. Every part of him was measured – parts of him he hadn't even known _could_ be measured were measured – and judged with a dispassionate eye that left him both blushing and cold. His beloved jacket was sniffed at, his shirt dismissed lazily, his pants removed to a distant corner of the room held between the tips of the tailor's thumb and index finger, as if the man would have preferred to levitate them if he'd been able to manage it.

By the end of it he wanted nothing more than to sink into the ground and disappear, but he still had to sit through two hours of paperwork that was, if anything, even more intrusive than the suit-measuring had been. Merlin asked about his parents, his medical history, his hobbies, his skills, his education, even his sex life, although there was little enough to tell, there. There was a long list of questions about things he might react irrationally about, half common ones like spiders and half decidedly uncommon ones like leather or lifts or beards. 

After that it got even worse, because when Eggsy decided that he was done, no really, fucking done now, ready to get Daisy and go back to their flat and make dinner and sleep, it turned out that his flat wasn't actually his flat anymore. Because Kingsman had gone and taken all of their stuff and moved it into a new place without so much as a by-your-leave.

The new flat was actually rather nice – it was a distant wing of Kingsman's manor, with a spacious kitchen diner, a sitting room, and a bedroom for each of them. French doors from the sitting room led out onto a lawn, shaded in parts with trees and bordered with flower beds and hedges. Inside, all of their things had been arranged just as they had been in their council flat – Daisy's stuffed animals had even been lined up on the end of her bed in the correct order. Their clothes had been unpacked into closets and drawers, and the things that had been in the hamper had been washed and put away with the others; Eggsy felt a cold flush run over him when he thought of someone from Kingsman handling his dirty pants, likely with as much disdain as the tailor had. He also found other things in his closet, a handful of button-up shirts that he knew weren't his, some khakis and dark trousers folded in the drawer next to his jeans, a pair of shiny black dress shoes lined up beside his precious winged trainers.

There was even a casserole in the oven, ready to be served.

If it hadn't been for the high-handedness of the whole thing, Eggsy knew he would have been chuffed to bits about how nice the place was. As it was, he simply didn't have it in him to argue and contented himself with closing the door in Merlin's face.

\-----

This time when Eggsy came around into the circle of stones he found the man kneeling, one hand outstretched to Mr. Pickle who was licking at it with considerable enthusiasm. At the sound of his footfall the man looked up, and Eggsy nearly stumbled just from the intensity of his gaze. A moment later the man rose, stepping towards him and holding out a hand. Eggsy took it and shook automatically, still rather dazzled. The man's hand was warm, the handshake firm without being overpowering.

″Thank you,″ the man said. ″Honestly. I had begun to think I might be stuck permanently.″

″Erm,″ said Eggsy. ″You're welcome? Though I ain't exactly sure it was anything I did.″

″It was,″ said the man. ″And quite well done it was, too. May I have the honor of knowing to whom I am indebted?″

It took Eggsy a long second to work out what that meant. ″Oh, right, right,″ he said. ″My name's Eggsy. Well, it's Gary, really, but I always thought Gary was a bit naff as a name, so.″ Eggsy wrinkled his nose and the man chuckled. 

″Eggsy, then. And I'm Harry.″

″Nice to meet you.″

For a beat, they just looked at each other. Eggsy didn't quite know how to carry on the conversation from here – what _did_ you say to someone you had just turned back from a statue into a man? – and it was clear that Harry didn't, either. Eventually Harry just laughed, a little ruefully, and Eggsy found himself joining in without consciously deciding to do so. 

″Shall we sit?″ Harry said, gesturing towards the ground.

Eggsy thought it would be a shame to get grass stains on that suit; his own trackies didn't need the mess, either, but only because they'd got plenty of stains already. Then again, it wasn't as if there were anywhere else to sit, and at least the day promised to be warm. ″Sure.″ He shrugged and sat, cross-legged, in the shade of the nearest stone; Harry folded himself gracefully into a similar position, managing to avoid Mr. Pickle who was standing eagerly at his heel.

″How the fuck do you make that look so easy?″ Eggsy blurted. ″Shit, that was rude, sorry. Sorry.″

Harry waved off his apologies. ″It's quite all right. I'm not entirely sure I understand what you mean, though.″

″It's not—″ Eggsy said, and then, ″You don't really want to hear this.″

″Certainly I do,″ said Harry. 

Eggsy opened his mouth to say something polite and bland, but then it all came pouring out at once, like the words had been there for hours, _days_ , just waiting for the chance to burble out all over the first remotely-willing listener. ″I got this new job, yeah?″ He had enough control not to mention Kingsman itself, but the details didn't really matter anyway. ″And it's good, it's great, it's—it's a real opportunity, the first one I ever had and fuck knows most things'd be better than working in a garage all my life, but it comes with all of that...″ He trailed off, searching for the right word, then finally just went for waving his hand at Harry's suit and saying, ″All of _that_. I spent fuckin' hours today being fitted for one of them things, _hours_ , and in the end, you know, they put me in this two thousand quid suit and all it did was make me look like a monkey in a two thousand quid suit.″ 

He ran out of steam then, squeezed his eyes shut so that he didn't have to look at the pity and disdain that was undoubtedly displayed on Harry's face. He'd only known the man, what, less than a minute? Maybe five, if you counted the time when Harry couldn't actually move or talk. And yet here Eggsy was spilling all his insecurities onto him like a drunk arsehole spilling beer on the bloke at the next table in the pub. It wasn't like Harry didn't have his own stuff to worry about, either – the man had been a statue up until forty five seconds ago, for fuck's sake.

But before he could spend too much time wallowing in his own stupidity, he felt Harry's hand come to rest on his shoulder. ″Dear boy,″ Harry said. Mr. Pickle woofed beside him. Eggsy opened his eyes. 

_Fuck me, he's pretty,_ he thought. This close he could see that Harry's eyes were a deep brown, flecked faintly with honey. 

″It isn't only about the suit,″ Harry said. ″Am I right about that?″

″Yeah,″ Eggsy admitted. He reached down and put his hand on Mr. Pickle's head, started scratching behind the dog's ears mainly just for something to do with himself. ″It's also… They want me to be a leader, tell people what to do. But I'm jus' some chav. I can't even talk proper.″ There was something about Harry that made it easy for Eggsy to admit things to him, even things he knew he'd never tell anyone else. ″What the fuck do I know about leading people? Much less leading a bunch of old posh blokes who look like they ain't never had to worry about where their next meal was comin' from.″

″I think you sell yourself short,″ Harry said. ″After all, you've already helped one old posh bloke today, haven't you?″ 

″Jesus, Harry, you ain't old!″ Eggsy said, but he could feel himself beginning to smile.

″I'm older than you'd think,″ said Harry. ″The point is, being a leader – being a gentleman – has nothing to do with one's accent. It isn't about where you were born. It doesn't require a two thousand pound suit. It's about being at ease in one's own skin. As Hemingway said, 'There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility is being superior to your former self.'″ He gave Eggsy's shoulder a squeeze. ″I haven't known you long, but I think you have the potential to do that. Obviously your new employers must do as well. The question is, do _you_ think you have that potential?″

Eggsy bit back a reflexive denial. After all, hadn't he already demonstrated that potential? Before Daisy he'd been, if not happy, then at least content to coast through life, working odd jobs and avoiding Dean and drinking too much. Perhaps joining the Marines had been his first step out of that life, but Daisy's birth had been the second one, the big one, and the man he was now could hardly recognize the boy he had been then. So who was to say this was it? Who was to say that this was all he'd ever be?

″Yeah,″ he said. ″Yeah. I can do it.″

″Excellent,″ Harry said softly, and it rolled through Eggsy like a wave of something molten and shimmering and bright. ″And I shall help you,″ Harry continued. ″The first step, I think, is to help you with that suit.″

\-----

The second day was better; Eggsy woke with Harry's advice about the suit fresh in his mind, and he was able to shower and dress in some of the new, nice clothes without feeling like he was suffocating. The new flat was strange, unnerving – but Daisy was the same as she had always been, cheerful and loud and eager to be doing something, and when he went into the kitchen he found it had been stocked with all of their favorite foods plus some nutritious-looking extras, which was a convenience he wasn't too proud to admit he could get used to very quickly.

He dropped Daisy off with Elaine and wandered through the manor's hallways, trying to fix the layout in his mind. His previous visits had all been closely shepherded by someone or other, but either they'd forgotten that he didn't know his way around or Merlin had taken a lesson from yesterday and decided to leave him on his own for a while.

There was a lot to discover – a gym, complete with jacuzzi and pool and just about any piece of equipment that he could have wanted; a shooting range; a library; a hallway of board rooms, each more posh than the next; another hallway of classrooms with white boards and desks. Not to mention multiple rooms locked with keypads that Eggs didn't bother trying to get into. When he finally did find Merlin's office, the two of them stared at each other for a long moment. Eggsy was trying to decide if he wanted to have a shouting match; he didn't have the faintest idea what Merlin was thinking.

At last Merlin said, ″How about I show you the arsenal, lad?″ 

Eggsy snorted and let himself give in. ″Truce,″ he said, and they shook on it.

\-----

That night, when he walked to the circle of standing stones, he was wearing the suit.


	4. Chapter 4

His life fell into a rhythm, after that; days spent with Kingsman learning the organization's history, sources of intelligence, new technology and old technology (there was the sword, and the grail, of course, which had been lost in the nineties, but also a ring and a dagger with powers of their own). Learning fighting skills – not with Excalibur, that would have been ridiculous, but they started him off with Geraint teaching him how to do all sorts of really fucking lethal shit with his hands and a promise that they'd get to knives and guns and those amazing lighter grenades eventually.

He spent his nights with Harry, catching up on the stuff Kingsman hadn't thought to teach him, things they probably assumed everyone knew. How to stand and walk confidently in his suit, how to sit with the little tug to his trouser legs. How to talk posh, how to make rich-wanker-appropriate small talk. Which spoon to use and how and when to place his napkin and what the weird fork with the curly tines was for. Whenever there was something needed for the lesson Eggsy found it with him as he stepped onto the grass and made his way into the circle of stones, which never seemed unusual at the time. In fact, nothing he did with Harry seemed unusual while he was doing it – he never questioned where they were or how they'd got there or why Harry was helping him, though he wondered about it sometimes when he was awake.

Still, it wouldn't do to look a gift horse in the mouth – however this thing with Harry had come about, it was helpful. Rapidly becoming essential, even, because Eggsy was starting to realize just how much he didn't know about functioning in a world where everyone had fifteen suits and a new car and a summer home. Essential, too, because Harry never looked at him like he was deficient even when he made his ignorance obvious. Just kept smiling at him with that warm, confident, kind smile that made Eggsy feel like he could do anything in the world to keep getting it.

\-----

It was day ten, and Eggsy was well past ready to punch Bors in the face. Technically all he was supposed to be doing was demonstrating that he could recognize the people Bors had given him to memorize, Kingsman donors and diplomatic contacts. Since this was about the most boring thing Eggsy could imagine, he'd taken to spicing it up a little by pretending to introduce each of them to himself as he went along, making sarcastic small talk about inane subjects.

He had thought he was doing rather well, actually – he'd drilled this with Harry the night before, memorizing subtleties of different forms of address using Mr. Pickle as a proxy for all the different people he was likely to meet. Now he kept the memories in the back of his mind as the monitor displayed pictures of various people, trying to mimic Harry as much as he could. 

The trouble was, Bors kept sort of… twitching. Eggsy could see it out of the corner of his eye, the way Bors' mouth curled up on the left side, his shoulders rising fractionally and then falling again. Eggsy couldn't tell why – maybe it was just that he was doing this wrong, somehow, though if so then Bors ought to have said something instead of just sitting there and giving him that look like a bitchy grandma. More likely it was just snobbery; Eggsy bet that Bors didn't expect a chav like him to have any sort of proper manners, and now he was having to face the fact that Eggsy could do this posh bullshit just as good as anyone, when he wanted to. Having to face the fact that Eggsy wasn't just going to turn it on and forget to turn it off again.

If that was it, Bors could just fucking eat it. Eggsy already felt a little like he was disappearing, becoming some version of himself that he could barely recognize. This was Gary Unwin, respectable young man, voicing his aitches and his gees, hair slicked back and trousers tailored. But if he was going to spend most of the day being Gary, he was damned if he wouldn't be Eggsy when he had the chance.

The day hadn't started off well. Daisy had been quiet at breakfast – too quiet; Eggsy had been worried that she was coming down with something, but when he attempted to feel her forehead she'd pushed his hand away sullenly. She hadn't even said goodbye when he dropped her off with Miss Elaine. He hadn't pushed it, then – too caught up in running through names in his head and trying to remember what Harry had said about differences between Ministers and backbenchers when it came to the form of address. Now he rather wished he had, because he couldn't put aside the worry that was growing steadily in his stomach.

_Focus_ , he told himself. At least he had the memories of last night's time with Harry and Mr. Pickle to distract him.

The screen flashed the next picture. This one he recognized without difficulty, mainly due to the woman's hair; it was Sylvie Bermann, the French Ambassador. He flashed back to one of the previous night's examples. 

_″Ambassador, I'd like you to meet my colleague Eggsy Unwin. Eggsy, this is Ambassador Pickle.″_

_″Delightful to meet you, Ambassador,″ Eggsy murmured, holding out his hand and grasping the dog's paw to shake._

He repeated it back now, aloud, pitching his voice slightly lower. ″Ambassador, I'd like you to meet my colleague Eggsy Unwin. Eggsy, this is Ambassador Bermann.″ And then, in his own voice, ″Delightful to meet you, Ambassador. What lovely weather we're having, don't you think? Why, I've never seen a sky that looks as much like a baboon's arse as this one.″

Bors twitched again, but he said nothing, merely clicked to display the next picture, which meant Eggsy was right in his identification. This one he was pretty sure was Clive Lewis.

_″Ah, Eggsy,″ Harry said lightly, as if they'd just encountered each other at a party. ″There's someone I'd like you to meet. Mr. Pickle, this is my colleague Mr. Eggsy Unwin. Eggsy, this is Mr. Tristan Pickle. Mr. Pickle is MP for Tottenham.″ He gave Eggsy a disapproving look as he dissolved into laughter._

_″Mr. Pickle's first name is_ Tristan _?″ Eggsy wheezed._

_″Well, he had to have something as a given name,″ Harry said matter-of-factly. ″It would have been odd if he'd just been Mr. Pickle, don't you think?″_

_″He's a dog, Harry,″ said Eggsy. ″You could've called him Snugglebumpkin and then he wouldn't'a needed a first name.″_

_″Mainly I called him Tristan to irritate a friend of mine,″ Harry admitted. ″His name was Tristan and he'd always hated it. I thought having a dog called Tristan would be rather a good joke. M— my friend started calling him Mr. Pickle in response, and somehow that was the name that stuck.″_

_He sounded wistful rather than amused, and Eggsy felt a pang in his chest. Harry didn't usually talk much about himself; he asked a lot of questions and gave a lot of advice, but he seemed to prefer Eggsy's stories to his own. Sometimes Eggsy thought about asking, but there was always something more important to talk about, or the moment just didn't feel right._

_It didn't feel right now, either, and so he swallowed the question that was on his lips and said, instead, ″A distinct pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pickle.″ He took the dog's paw, gave it a shake. Mr. Pickle bore this patiently._

Bors coughed, and Eggsy realized abruptly that he'd drifted off into remembering instead of focusing on what he was supposed to be doing. 

″Ah, Eggsy,″ he said, introducing himself once again. ″There's someone I'd like you to meet. Mr. Lewis, this is my colleague Eggsy Unwin. Eggsy, this is Mr. Clive Lewis. Mr. Lewis is the Shadow Secretary of State for Defense.″ He paused, then followed up as himself. ″A distinct pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lewis. I've heard so many interesting things about you, you know. Tell me, is it true you were once mugged by a swan?″

Bors twitched again and clicked through to the next picture. Eggsy was getting distinctly tired of that twitch, but he carried on gamely anyway. The identity of this picture was rather given away by the collar, though Eggsy had to struggle a moment to remember which Bishop it was.

_″Have the two of you met?″ Harry said, leading into the next introduction with one eyebrow raised in gentle inquiry. Eggsy shook his head, trying not to think about the way his stomach thrilled when Harry looked him in the eye. ″Ah,″ Harry continued. ″Then let me do the honors. Bishop Pickle, this is my colleague Eggsy Unwin. Eggsy, this is Bishop Pickle.″ He gave Eggsy a quelling look as laughter threatened to overwhelm him once again. ″This is all assuming you are encountering these people in social situations, of course. If you are to meet them in a more formal setting, you should expect everyone to be using their titles.″_

_Eggsy shrugged. ″I think it's more likely social – just to make connections and see if we can get money out of 'em, really.″_

_″Yes, a social encounter is more useful for fundraising purposes. You may wish to take up a socially acceptable hobby.″_

_″Like what?″_

_″Golf,″ Harry said bluntly, and then, when Eggsy made a face, ″Yes, I know, it's dull. There's no getting around it, I'm afraid.″_

Eggsy had thought golf the dullest thing in the universe in that moment, but now he was beginning to think that sitting in a room identifying pictures of politicians might actually be worse. He heaved out a sigh. ″Have you two met?″ he asked himself, replying with a shake of the head. If Bors were actually participating, it might have been marginally less agonizing. Then again, who even knew what Bors' idea of small talk looked like. It was entirely possible that it might make this – and golf – look positively exciting by comparison. ″Then allow me to do the honors. Bishop Butler, this is—″ 

The door burst open. 

″Thank fuck,″ Eggsy said, thinking that Bors must be needed for some urgent mission, but when Roxy came in it was him she went to, not Bors.

″It's Daisy,″ she said. ″She's not hurt, but she's screaming and we can't calm her.″

Eggsy left Bors without a backwards glance.

\-----

The tantrum lasted almost an hour. Eggsy wasn't sure at first if his presence was helping or hurting, but after he heard the words, ″You don't love me″ he planted himself in one of the tiny nursery chairs and stayed while Daisy screamed and cried and beat her little fists against his chest. She told him that she hated Miss Elaine and she hated their new flat and she hated knights – and worst of all, she told him that she hated him and she never wanted to see him again.

By the end of it he was crying, too, holding her close despite it all and trying to keep himself from making extravagant promises that he knew he couldn't keep.

When she finally ran out of steam they sat in silence. Eventually Eggsy started to hum under his breath, one of the lullabies that his mum had used to sing, the one about all the pretty little horses. Slowly, slowly, Daisy's arms crept up around his neck.

He'd fucked up, he could see that now. Could see how, in excruciating detail. Ten days they'd been doing this and he hadn't made time for her beyond dinner and a bit of kids' telly and the usual bedtime routine. Before, they'd always spent the weekends together, in the park or at a museum or playing together in the sitting room if it was wet outdoors. Now she was stuck with only Elaine for company all day. She didn't even have other children to play with, because none of the other Kingsmen had kids. And Eggsy had been so tired at the end of his days, so weary from stuffing his brain full of administrative bullshit, that he hadn't had much energy left to offer her. Oh, he'd made sure that she was fed and washed and sleeping, he'd done everything that was necessary. 

But he hadn't given her anything of _himself_.

″I'll make it better,″ he vowed softly. ″I will, Daisy luv. We'll spend some time just you and me. I'll find you some new friends, too, but we'll have our weekends just for us, I promise you.″

Because what good was all of this money, all of this privilege, the good food and the free education and all of the things he could give her? What good was the chance to save the world? What good was any of it, if he had to give this up to get it? 

\-----

After that he made sure to take weekends off just for the two of them. He booked Daisy into a preschool down the road, too, an exclusive one with a good teacher ratio and an excellent reputation. The first few days were rough, but she made friends soon enough and things improved then, got back to being almost like they'd always been, though every once in a while Eggsy thought he could detect a hint of wariness in her eyes.

He changed things for himself, too – started learning things that weren't just names and paperwork and fist fighting. Things that were actually fun: how to pick locks, how to disarm bombs, how to plant tracking devices on someone with a touch on the shoulder as he passed by. How to decode secret messages, how to read people's tells. How to jump out of a plane, how to shoot. Learning the strengths and weaknesses of the knights, because he'd have to know who to send where and for what, and finding his own connections with each of them: Bedivere's love of explosives, Geraint's tendency to pick code phrases from Disney movies. No one ever talked about Galahad and after that first time Eggsy knew better than to ask. He supposed he'd have to, someday – they'd have to replace the man, someday – but not yet, not when they were obviously all still a little raw about it.

Roxy was, perhaps, his favorite – it wasn't just because of her endless patience with Daisy, although that was definitely a factor, but also she had a wicked sense of humor and an almost instinctive ability to know when he needed a laugh so that he didn't scream. But Merlin turned out to be a good mate, too, once they got past Eggsy's not-undeserved paranoia about the whole 'someone from Kingsman packed my underwear drawer' thing and Merlin's frustration whenever Eggsy filled in a form with 'blah blah blah' written all the way down the page.

It was interesting work – well, most of it, anyway. He'd never thought he'd have a job that required this much thinking, but it was undeniably satisfying to solve one of Merlin's little puzzles or to master a task that had been set for him or to hit a target dead center, fifteen times in a row.

And yet there wasn't a day that passed that he didn't feel desperately, achingly out of place. The other Kingsmen all knew so much more than he did; what was worse, they all knew each other, had a thousand little jokes and references that made no fucking sense to anyone else, like Merlin's favorite mug which had a picture of a blue ribbon on it. Maybe after three years he'd know them, too, but right now it was unbearable. All of the knights were polite enough – most of them even respected him, once he'd shown that he could fight and that he wasn't a complete numpty – but they didn't _like_ him, they weren't his friends.

He wanted to talk to Ryan and Jamal and Dave and the boys at the garage, even pulled out his new phone to text them once or twice a day at first. Sometimes he even typed it out, the text, what it would say, but in the end he always put the phone away without sending anything. It was partly the phone itself, Kingsman proprietary tech, sleek and sexy and a thousand times more expensive than anything he'd've even looked at before, because every time he looked at it he thought about how different his life was from theirs, now. What would they even have to say to each other? He couldn't tell them the truth about what he did all day – for one, because, you know, secret spy organization, and for two because who the fuck would even believe it anyway?

He wondered what they would think, if they could see his swank new flat and his closet full of posh suits. Would they just think that he'd had a chance to get out and he'd got out, that they'd take the same chance, too, if it'd been offered to them? Or would they think he'd sold himself out just for the cash, abandoned everything that made him who he was?

Even Eggsy didn't know which one of those was the truth.

There was the sword, too – the damn thing just wouldn't _shut up_ , wouldn't stop whispering at him whenever he was in the same room with it or even down the hall, though he still couldn't make out any of the words. He'd taken to leaving it on top of the dresser in his bedroom mainly out of spite, though he had no idea if it even cared where it was so long as he came back every once and a while. Every night before he went to bed he stood with his hand on the hilt of the sword for a few minutes, straining himself to listen. Wondering if someday it would give him a purpose, a quest. Or at least tell him what the fuck he was supposed to be doing here, other than learning twenty seven ways to kill someone and the fifty eight different pieces of paperwork he might need to fill out, afterward. 

He couldn't help but think it would have been different if he'd been recruited as a knight first. It was easy to imagine himself being plucked out of the Marines for his potential, run through all sorts of trials and tests until he'd shown that he could handle anything Kingsman would throw at him. Easy to imagine each knight taking him under their wing in turn, sharing all their years of accumulated wisdom. Easy to imagine working his way up through the organization, proving himself mission by mission. He could have been Arthur then, eventually. He might even have enjoyed it, if he'd got there the long way. 

What kept him going were the nights spent with Harry. After they went through all the basic gentleman stuff, Harry started teaching him other things, fun things. How to mix drinks, how to order them, how to look like he was getting drunk without actually drinking much. How to ballroom dance and how to politely escape from dancing. Sometimes they just lay on their backs in the grass, Harry in his suit and Eggsy in his trackies and tee, staring at the standing stones, basking in the light of the sun that rose just a fraction higher each night. Sometimes they threw a ball for Mr. Pickle to chase (Eggsy quite enjoyed dreaming up new and unusual dog toys), or made cocktails for each other, which Harry said was good practice. 

It was the only time Eggsy felt like he could be just himself. With Kingsman there was always the pressure of proving himself, proving that the sword had been right about him and that he wasn't just some punk kid. That he could lead them. Even with Daisy he was always careful to be his best self, especially now, a big brother who did the dishes every night and paid his bills on time and ate all his vegetables without prompting when what he wanted was a pint and a pizza and two hours in front of the telly. 

With Harry, none of that mattered. Even when he was teaching Eggsy gentleman stuff, correcting the way he held his fork or the way he said 'precipitous' or whatever, there was an affection to it. Perhaps it was because Eggsy had done something good, right at the start of their friendship, and that set the tone for everything that came after. Perhaps it was just that Harry saw something in him that no one else had seen. Whatever it was, Eggsy liked it, came to _rely_ on it just to get himself through the day, the thought that at the end of it he'd get to see Harry again.

He still didn't know where Harry had come from, who he was – or even _what_ he was. Sometimes he thought maybe Harry was a manifestation of Excalibur, because 'older than you'd think' plus 'existing in Eggsy's mind' plus 'was frozen until Eggsy touched him' all sort of started to sound pretty similar to 'is actually a magical sword that has been drawn from a stone.' But then there was Mr. Pickle, which Eggsy couldn't quite square with anything else. Why would a sword have a dog? But then again, why does anyone have a dog? Why _shouldn't_ a sword have a dog, if it wanted one?

Generally about the time Eggsy found himself thinking about this kind of thing, he made himself stop. Because if he thought too hard about it he might have to acknowledge that actually, he was falling a bit in love with Harry – with his gentle encouragement and his kind eyes and his sly sense of humor. Falling in love with the way Harry's cheeks dimpled when he smiled, the way his hair curled up on the left side of his head, the way his arse looked absolutely incredible in that suit.

And if he thought too hard about _that_ , he might have to acknowledge that falling in love with the psychic manifestation of a sword was an absolute disaster, possibly the most ridiculous disaster in Eggsy's long history of absurd and terrible disasters. And there wasn't a thing he could do about it.


	5. Chapter 5

It was supposed to have been a milk run. 

Eggsy was two months into his tenure with Kingsman, but this was the first mission he'd supervised directly. He'd been choosing the missions for a while now, working from dossiers that the other knights compiled of potential issues and targets, picking which ones he thought they should handle and which they should pass off to other agencies. At first he'd merely accepted the knights' analysis as given, but recently he'd begun pushing back a little, trying to steer the mission priorities according to his own sense of how their resources could best be used. It wasn't always easy; some of the knights – Bors in particular – had strong opinions about what was and wasn't worth their time, not all of which agreed with Eggsy's. Bors had given in when Eggsy made his assignment an order, of course, but not graciously.

Today's mission wasn't one of the contested ones – in fact, they'd nearly universally agreed that it was minor enough to be passed to Scotland Yard, but for the fact that Merlin thought it would be a good training run for Eggsy's handling skills. ″It'll give you a sense of what it's like to run a mission when everything goes according to plan,″ he'd said, which in retrospect had probably just been asking for trouble.

Because now here they were, Eggsy sat in front of a bank of screens and Merlin standing behind him, both of them snapping rapid instructions to the backup team while Geraint bled out onto the pavement of an alley in west Manchester, six blocks from the warehouse. A warehouse that was supposed to have been empty, abandoned, unguarded – but was, instead, filled with pallets of something that glowed purple in the dark and guarded by a set of ultrasonic security devices that were far more sophisticated than anything Kingsman had seen before. 

Geraint had snagged one of the security devices on his way out, but while he was disabling it enough to pull it off the wall he'd set off a secondary defense system and been hit at close range with a spray of metal shards coated in something poisonous. He'd managed to get his arm up in front of his face, then grabbed the device and ran, but only got as far as the alley before the poison kicked in.

When Lamorak arrived Geraint was still breathing, still awake, but only just. Eggsy fell silent while Lamorak worked on first aid – he didn't need Merlin to tell him that he'd only be a distraction if he said something now. Instead he occupied himself with going over the mission in his head. 

He knew the exact moment when he'd fucked up, of course. They'd started off when Geraint left the hotel, just to let him get into the swing of it. Guiding a mission was a balancing act, with half his attention on Geraint and half on the surveillance information. He had one screen that was split into four, showing feeds of various CCTV cameras, and another screen with Geraint's glasses feed expanded to fill the entire monitor. He had an earbud in one ear and the other left free so that Merlin could offer advice from behind him. It had taken a while to get used to switching his gaze from one image to the next in quick succession, but eventually it became a habit almost like when he was driving, going from road to rearview mirror to side mirror and back again without thinking about it. 

He'd got more confident as they went along, but he'd still felt a pang of something not-quite-right when Geraint reached the warehouse district at last and stepped silently into the dark between buildings. 

And he'd said nothing. 

Looking back on it now he could see that there had been something suspicious that had caught his eye – too much rubbish in the alley, or the wrong kind of rubbish. Just a faint indication that perhaps the place wasn't as abandoned as they'd thought. Eggsy was intimately acquainted with a wide variety of warehouse rubbish, given the kind of work he'd been doing over the last few years. 

But in the moment he'd dismissed it, chalked it up to his own uncertainty or perhaps just a residual desire for a bit of a thrill – after all, he was involved in an honest-to-god secret spy mission, and what would that be without a little excitement?

Then it had all gone to hell.

″I think he's safe to move,″ said Lamorak, and Eggsy snapped back to himself with a start. Geraint's glasses feed was still displaying nothing but shadows, the walls of the alley and nearby building roofs. Lamorak's feed showed that he'd bandaged Geraint's arm and was slipping him into a new jacket. Geraint said something, too quietly for Eggsy to make out.

″Good,″ Eggsy said. ″Bring him home, then.″ His stomach felt like it was filled with lead.

Both video feeds stuttered as Lamorak hoisted Geraint into an upright position, half draped over Lamorak's back with his good arm. Eggsy picked them up on a CCTV camera as they came out of the alley, looking for all the world like they were on their way back from a night out, just one man helping his mate home when he was too pissed to walk on his own. 

He followed them on screen as far as the safehouse, was preparing to follow them all the way back to the manor when Merlin reached over his shoulder and turned off the screen.

″Oi!″ Eggsy said. 

″You can go on home now,″ Merlin said. ″He'll be all right, and I'll handle it from here.″

″Go to hell,″ Eggsy said. ″I nearly got 'im killed – the least I can do is stick around to apologize in person.″

″Oh, lad,″ Merlin said. He set a hand on Eggsy's shoulder. For a brief moment Eggsy felt the weight he was carrying ease a little. ″It wasn't your fault. The intelligence was faulty. Sometimes these things happen, even when we do our best. You know that, right?″

″Yeah, 'course,″ Eggsy said. Merlin didn't know – couldn't know, Eggsy couldn't let on – that it absolutely was his fault. That if he'd just said something when he noticed the wrongness, Geraint wouldn't have been hurt. To his own ears the words sounded hollow, unconvincing, but Merlin merely squeezed his shoulder gently and let go. The weight all came rushing back again, heavier than ever. He didn't know how Merlin could bear it – how any of them could, knowing that so much of what they did was literally a matter of life or death. He'd thought that being responsible for Daisy was worry enough, but this was so much worse. Because some day it wouldn't be all right. Some day one of them would be dead, and it would be on Eggsy's watch – a mission he'd chosen, intelligence that he'd missed.

He pushed back out of the chair abruptly, wanting to be alone. ″I'll be in my office. Tell me when they get in, yeah?″

″All right,″ Merlin said.

\-----

By the time Geraint and Lamorak returned, it was nearly two in the morning. Eggsy was still up, hunched over the mission dossier though he had long since ceased reading and was just abstractly tracing the shapes of the letters. Daisy was sleeping over at Roxy's place – she was almost certainly conked out by now, after a couple of hours of what Eggsy had been informed would contain manicures, high tea, and karate, though perhaps not in that order – so he took his time walking through the hall down to the medical wing. 

When he arrived Geraint was asleep, hooked up to a series of monitors that swished and hummed with a reassuring regularity, and so it was Lamorak that he had to face. The man said little and Eggsy couldn't find even a hint of accusation in the interaction, but still he left with his jaw set tight, his shoulders knotted.

Back in his flat he changed into pyjamas, brushed his teeth and set his alarm for seven. Before he went to sleep he stood with his hand on Excalibur's hilt as usual, listening, hoping against hope for some message of reassurance or support. But there was nothing – only the usual whispering, just beyond the threshold of understanding. Eventually he gave up and climbed into bed, closed his eyes and was asleep in minutes.

\-----

When he arrived at the standing stones, Harry took one look at him and pulled him into a one-armed hug; Eggsy wrapped his arms around Harry's waist, buried his face in Harry's shoulder and hung on tight, not even bothering to pretend he didn't want it. They didn't touch often, beyond handshakes and Harry's occasional correction of his posture, and it felt amazing to be held. Harry was solid, strong, and he smelled like something rich and comfortable. 

The hug lasted a long time. When they separated, Eggsy flopped down onto the grass with a sigh, arranged himself so that he could lie on his back with arms folded up under his head. Harry lay down beside him; Mr. Pickle came to sit between them, his head plumped on Eggsy's hip. They didn't speak.

The sun was tipped over its zenith, just beginning to ease into its path towards the far horizon. Eggsy kept thinking about Geraint; the man had no family – parents dead, no siblings, never married or even dated seriously, according to his personnel file. No close friends outside Kingsman. Eggsy had left Lamorak still sitting with him – it was heartening to see the camaraderie between them, but frightening to see how isolated they all were. Eggsy wondered if that was to be his own future. Some of the other knights had family, sisters and nieces and nephews, but none of them were in on Kingsman's secrets. None of the knights were married or had children; Daisy was a real anomaly. 

Eggsy didn't want to think about what it would be like to find himself the one in the hospital wing, how lonely it would be. Didn't want to think about what it would be like when he died – would anyone even know, besides the few here? 

He thought, at least, that his death would be mourned; the other knights still mourned Galahad, though it had been months. And perhaps Harry would mourn him, if Eggsy stopped coming.

″I never asked you,″ Eggsy said abruptly. ″You got a family?″ It was as if that hug had loosed something he hadn't even known he'd been holding back. He wanted Harry – of course he did, the man was a walking wet dream – but more than that he wanted Harry's affection, wanted his confidence. Wanted to know him, inside and out.

He could feel Harry go still beside him. ″Not really,″ Harry said, after a moment.

″Just you and Mr. Pickle, then?″ said Eggsy lightly. He freed one arm so that he could reach down to scratch behind the dog's ears. 

″Y-es,″ Harry said, but he drew the word out, hesitating, and if anything it seemed to make him tense up even more. Then he blew out a breath, and added, ″I did have friends, once. Good friends. Perhaps I'd've kept them, if I hadn't been such a complete arse.″ Eggsy turned his head to look at him, and Harry smiled ruefully. ″Let that be a lesson to you, Eggsy. One's friends should be held more precious than almost anything.″

Something in Eggsy's chest turned over. He thought of Ryan and Jamal, probably having a pint together right now and thinking about what a complete twat he was for disappearing off the face of the earth. Or, worse, maybe they weren't thinking of him at all.

″How'd you fuck it up, then?″ Eggsy asked. ″If you don't mind talking about it.″ 

Harry sighed. ″I got obsessed with something. Thought I knew what would fix all our problems if I could just find it. I think I spent about six months not thinking of anything else. The rest of my work fell by the wayside – _friendship_ fell by the wayside. And then when I found what I was looking for, of course it wasn't as simple as that. In fact, it didn't solve any of the problems at all. It only made them worse, I'm afraid.″

″You could apologize,″ Eggsy suggested. He wished that he'd thought to ask Harry about himself before now. Because how long had Harry been carrying this around, how long had it been since he had anyone but Mr. Pickle to talk to?

″It's too late for that,″ said Harry. ″Besides, there are other factors that prevent me from doing so. I just wish...″ He was talking softly now, almost to himself more than Eggsy.

″Yeah?″ Eggsy said gently. 

″I wish I could tell Merlin that it wasn't his fault,″ said Harry. ″He took it hard – perhaps harder than I did, in his own way. What a fool I was to make it all about me, when it was really about all of us." He huffed out a laugh. "He always said I was such a drama queen.″

Eggsy ought to have reassured him then, but all he could think was— ″Merlin?″ he said. ″You know Merlin?″

Harry blinked at him, as if Eggsy weren't speaking English. ″I know _a_ Merlin,″ he said cautiously. ″Although I would have said it was unlikely for you to know him as well.″ Eggsy scrambled up into a seated position; Mr. Pickle woofed unhappily at being displaced, but he ignored it. A horrible suspicion was beginning to creep into the back of his mind. If Harry knew Merlin – but how, when he was only here in this place? Come to think of it, where _was_ this place? How had he got here? How had _Harry_ got here? 

Why hadn't he thought to ask Harry any of these questions before?

Harry sat up slowly, his eyes locked on Eggsy's face. 

″What did they call you?″ Eggsy said. ″Tell me.″ And then, when Harry just gaped at him, ″Harry. _Tell me_.″

″Galahad,″ said Harry. ″They called me Galahad.″

The air around them shivered when the word left his mouth. Eggsy felt a chill roll through him, as if a cloud had passed over the sun. He looked up – there were no clouds here, there had never been clouds – but though the sky was clear as ever and the sun still bright, it gave off no real warmth. And… it was moving, faster than it ever had before, sinking towards the far horizon. 

″Harry!″ Eggsy said. ″What's going on?″

″I don't know,″ said Harry, eyes gone wide. ″Eggsy, how did you find out about Kingsman?″

The sun was more than halfway to the horizon now.

″There was—″ Eggsy said, then abandoned the attempt at explanation. ″I'm Arthur now. The sword—″

″Arthur?″ Harry said, and then, with an odd sort of relief in his voice, he said it again. ″Arthur.″

The sky was darkening now, turning blood red to Eggsy's right and shading into the deep purple of dusk to his left. ″Harry,″ he said. He grabbed for Harry's arm and caught only the edge of his sleeve, fumbled in the dim light for a better grip only to find nothing but air. ″Harry!″ He reached out into the darkness as it fell completely. His hand smashed against one of the stones and then he felt it, too, disappear. Above him, there were no stars.

″It's all right,″ Harry's voice said. Eggsy couldn't tell which direction it was coming from, but Harry sounded confident again, sure of himself. ″Eggsy. Oh my dear boy. It's all right,″ he said, and then Eggsy woke in his bedroom with his arms still outstretched, still reaching for him.

He stumbled out of bed, half-tangled in the blankets so that he had to spend a long second kicking himself free. Then it was three steps across the carpeted floor to the dresser. The sword was whispering at him, louder than he'd ever heard it, and it was glowing cold silver just like when he'd pulled it from the stone. He put his hand to the hilt and then the palm of his other hand to the flat of the blade. 

″Galahad,″ he said. 

The sword's exultation sparked and caught and ran through his veins like wildfire. When it spoke again, he heard the words clearly for the first time. ″Yes,″ it said. ″Yes. And now you will find him for me.″

\-----

″So, this Galahad of yours,″ Eggsy said, coming into Merlin's office the following morning. 

″Yes?″ said Merlin shortly, without looking up from his tablet. He was still wearing yesterday's clothes, as if he'd slept in his office or maybe hadn't slept at all; Eggsy thought about Harry saying how Merlin had taken it hard (whatever it had been, he still didn't know the details), thought about how pale he'd been during the worst of it yesterday, even though his hands and his voice had been steady as a rock. Maybe Eggsy wasn't so alone in freaking out about Geraint's injuries. Maybe he wasn't so alone, full stop.

At least he was about to give Merlin something more interesting to think about.

″Tall chap,″ Eggsy said. He flopped down into a chair, swung his legs up so that he could put his feet on the corner of the desk, right ankle hooked over left. ″Brown eyes, ridiculous floppy hair. Likes to dress all fancy-like, yeah?″ By now Merlin _had_ looked up, eyes going a bit wide, and they only got wider when Eggsy finished, ″Has a dog called Mr. Pickle?″

″How the bloody buggering fuck do you know that?″ Merlin said.

″Because I dreamed him last night,″ said Eggsy, and then the real bombshell, ″And I'm pretty sure he ain't dead.″

Merlin's tablet thumped onto the table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Evil of me to leave it here, I know. I promise I won't leave you waiting too long!


	6. Chapter 6

Merlin sat listening in silence as Eggsy laid out the basics: the way the sword whispered to him, the dreams, the standing stones, Harry's frozen form and Mr. Pickle, the lessons, the sun moving slowly across a cloudless sky. The way Harry didn't talk about himself, didn't give his last name – the way Eggsy hadn't thought to question it when he was asleep, the way, when he was awake, he'd thought maybe Harry _was_ Excalibur, somehow. Then last night, asking Harry about himself.

″We were talking about mistakes,″ Eggsy said. ″And he said he'd made a cracking one, fucked it up big time and lost his friends. I guess he was trying to be reassuring or summat. Not doing it very well, mind. And he said, 'I wish I could tell Merlin that it wasn't his fault.'″ 

Merlin pushed himself up out of his chair at this, paced the two steps to the far end of his desk and then back again. ″Was that it?″ he asked after a moment. His hands curled into fists and then relaxed.

Eggsy shook his head. ″'He took it hard,'″ he continued, groping in his memory for Harry's exact words. ″'Perhaps harder than I did, in his own way. What a fool I was to make it all about me, when it was really about all of us. He always said I was such a drama queen.'″

Merlin's expression altered, but so minutely that Eggsy couldn't tell just what, exactly, had changed. And then he laughed, a sharp bark that sounded like it was being ripped from his throat. ″He certainly was that. _Is_ that, I suppose. Christ.″ He bent over, bracing his fists on his knees.

Eggsy dropped his feet from the desk. ″You all right, mate? I know it's kinda a lot to take in.″

″Oh, never better,″ Merlin said, and then, straightening up, ″You've never asked what happened to your predecessor.″

Eggsy blinked, caught wrong-footed by the change of topic. ″I s'pose I just assumed… He weren't killed in the line of duty?″

″No,″ Merlin said. ″No indeed. I trust you remember the SIM cards massacre.″ 

There was a sinking feeling in Eggsy's stomach. ″Yeah,″ he said. ″It's why I'm— why I've got Daisy to look after. I thought Valentine was behind all that, though.″ 

″Oh, he was,″ Merlin said. He walked to the window, half turned away so that Eggsy could only see the side of his face. ″But he recruited a fair few people to his cause. Powerful people. The type who thought they were better than everyone else. Thought they ought to be the only ones to live. And Chester was one of them.″ 

'Chester?' Eggsy mouthed incredulously, but Merlin carried on before he could fixate on the absurdity of the name. 

″We think it was only when Valentine came to Kingsman's attention that he got involved. Valentine gave him the same pitch that he gave the others and… he bought in. Of course, he couldn't just drop the investigation all together – that would have been too suspicious. So he sent Galahad to look into it, but fed him misleading information. He kept Valentine informed of everything as well. It could have been disastrous. Should have been, really.″ 

″So what happened?″ Eggsy asked softly. Obviously, everyone in the world wasn't dead, a fact for which he was distinctly grateful. 

″Galahad figured out that someone at Kingsman was a traitor, though he didn't know who. So he pretended he'd got a lead on one of the royals who'd gone missing, went off – apparently – to look into it and then circled back around to Valentine himself without telling anyone. He found Valentine's lair just as he was setting off the SIM cards, had to fight his way in. It was a near thing, but Harry won out in the end.″ Merlin scrubbed a hand over his face. ″And then afterwards, he spent a year trying to find the traitor, sifting through computer logs and archived video and phone records. Making connections. Chester had covered his tracks well – better than I thought he could have. And the microchip – Valentine's select few were implanted with a microchip in the neck, one that let him ensure they would keep his secrets. I think Chester must have cut it out himself when he saw that things were going wrong. He had a bandage on his neck after the massacre, but none of us thought anything of it. Everyone was injured then. And...″ Merlin shrugged. ″He was Arthur. Excalibur had chosen him.″ 

There was an expression of terrible grief on his face. It was not unlike the look Eggsy had found on Harry's face, the first time he'd seen him. 

″When Harry discovered the truth, he— Well. He'd been Chester's recruit, you see.″ 

″Shit,″ Eggsy said softly. 

″There was a confrontation,″ Merlin continued. ″Chester admitted everything, tried to sway Harry to his view. When he wouldn't be swayed, they fought, and Harry killed him.″ 

Eggsy could remember the moment when Dean had first hit his mum, the crushing sense of loss and betrayal that he'd felt. A moment later he'd pushed between them and taken the second blow in the face himself – and worse than any of that was what came after, when Dean had stormed out to the pub and Eggsy had met his mum's eyes and known that she wouldn't leave. He'd been eight years old. It wasn't the same, of course, but Eggsy thought maybe he could imagine a little of what Harry must have felt. 

″After that Harry became obsessed with the idea of the grail, the one that went missing,″ Merlin said. ″I believe he thought that if we had it, if we made everyone drink from it periodically, that it would ensure our purity.″ 

″Purity?!″ said Eggsy. His eyebrows went up. 

″Not that kind of purity,″ Merlin said, but he turned away from the window now, looking distinctly amused. Eggsy was just glad to have wiped that horrible look off his face. ″Spiritual purity. In any case, he spent a while trying to track where it might have gone, and then one day he just disappeared, left a note saying he was going to go and look for it and he ought to be back in a day or two. He turned off all his trackers, slipped out through a camera blind spot. That was the last we heard of him. After two months with no word, I made the call. But I suppose that's why none of us have pushed to fill the position.″ 

″He told me that, in the dream,″ Eggsy said. ″Not the details, but. He said he was looking for something that would solve all of Kingsman's problems. And then when he found it, it turned out it didn't solve anything at all.″ 

″So he did find it,″ Merlin said. 

″Yeah,″ Eggsy said. ″Which is good, innit?″ 

″Is it?″ Merlin said. 

″Well, yeah. 'Cause it means I should be able to figure out where he— oh, right, I didn't get to that bit. Lemme tell you the rest.″ He told Merlin about his own sudden realizations – that Harry was Galahad, that he didn't know where they were or how they'd got there or why he hadn't wondered about it before. About the sun moving across the sky, the way Harry had disappeared in the darkness. About waking and stumbling to Excalibur, about hearing it speak to him in his mind. 

″'And now you will find him for me,'″ Eggsy repeated. ″That's what it said. So, er.″ He rubbed the back of his neck. ″Guess that's what I'm gonna do.″ 

Merlin was silent for a long moment – long enough that Eggsy had begun to think he'd presumed too much or had made some huge, obvious, stupid mistake, when Merlin finally spoke. ″Yes, I believe you will,″ he said. He took a breath. ″Are you going to tell them?″ 

Eggsy frowned, his gaze flicking away over Merlin's left shoulder. The tension in his chest had not dissipated with the question – if anything, he felt even more uncertain of himself. Would it be kinder, he wondered, not to tell the other knights that Harry was alive until Eggsy had something concrete to show? Because the truth was, he didn't have the faintest idea how he was going to do it. It was all very well to say he would try, of course, and he would try his damndest. But what could he do that Merlin and the others wouldn't already have done? He wasn't half as good at investigating shit as any of them, wasn't as experienced. And he didn't know Harry very well, either – enough to know that he loved Harry. Enough to know that he wanted to know more. But surely one of his friends would have been a better choice for the task. Surely Merlin would have been better. 

″I dunno,″ he said. ″D'you think I should?″ 

″Arthur,″ Merlin said firmly, and Eggsy startled at the name. He still wasn't used to hearing it, in part because the knights rarely used it. They called him sir, when they called him anything at all. Mostly they just avoided addressing him by name or honorific entirely. Eggsy hadn't bothered saying anything about it – because to tell the truth he didn't really think of himself as Arthur, either. He was just... Eggsy. 

″Arthur,″ Merlin said again, and Eggsy dragged his attention back to Merlin's face. Merlin didn't look like he was doubting Eggsy, or wishing it was him that Excalibur had spoken to, or even pitying him for the task he'd been given. He just looked… expectant. ″Are you going to tell them?″ 

And suddenly it wasn't difficult at all for Eggsy to make his decision. ″Yeah,″ he said. ″Yeah, I'm going to tell them.″ 

\----- 

An hour later the Kingsmen were all crowded around Geraint's hospital bed – most of them in chairs they'd brought in, all crammed together, with Merlin on one of the doctor's rolling stools and Kay perched on the side of the bed. Only Caradoc was absent, being stuck in Buenos Aires at the moment, but he was just waiting for a courier delivery and they had his feed up on the screen above the bed. 

Eggsy stood awkwardly in the doorway. It had been his first time putting out the 'no one is dead but I need you here ASAP' signal, and he'd taken an inordinate amount of pleasure in pressing the button on the tablet when Merlin handed it to him. But now, with all of them gathered, it reminded him too much of the way he'd first met them, all in ranks down the sides of the board room table waiting in expectant silence. 

″Er,″ Eggsy said, and then, in a flash of sudden inspiration, ″Right, so, Merlin's gonna tell you what this is all about.″ 

″Oh, no,″ Merlin said immediately. ″It's your quest, therefore you have to explain it. Kingsman standard rule, I'm afraid.″ 

″That was not in the list of rules you gave me,″ Eggsy said. 

″Certainly it was,″ said Merlin, deadpan. ″Page forty seven, line six. Are you implying that you didn't actually read everything that I gave you?″ He was almost certainly taking the piss – but then again, Eggsy definitely hadn't read everything, mainly because he was going to die someday and he didn't want to have wasted the prime years of his life reading five hundred tons of paperwork. And Kingsman did sort of seem like the kind of place that would have a batshit rule about quest procedures. 

″Er,″ Eggsy said. ″Actually, that does sound familiar, now that you mention it. Must'a just slipped my mind for a moment.″ He knew he sounded like an idiot, but at least half of the knights were smiling now, and that was an improvement no matter how he looked at it. ″Well, all right. Here's the thing.″ There was no gentle way of doing this. ″Harry Hart. He's alive. And I'm gonna go and find him.″ 

A beat – and then Geraint said, slowly and with the exaggerated diction of the heavily drugged, ″What?″ 

Eggsy told the story again, eliding the details of what he and Harry had actually talked about most of the time. He kept in the bit about the sun passing over the sky, his own unnatural lack of curiosity about the dreams when he was in them, the way Excalibur had spoken to him when he'd woken at last. ″So,″ he finished. ″Seems like he went to look for the grail and got stuck somewhere. All I got to do is go and un-stick him.″ He offered an awkward grin. Undoubtedly it would be more difficult than he was making it sound – but that wasn't the point, just at the moment. 

Lamorak broke the silence with a huff. ″Typical Harry,″ he said. He swiped a hand over his face. ″The man never met a ridiculous impossibility he didn't like.″ A laugh made its way around the room at this. 

″Tell me about him,″ Eggsy said quietly. Because yeah, he knew Harry, sort of. He knew Harry as a mentor, even a friend – but a friend under unusual circumstances. That was very different from knowing him as his friends of long standing must know him. 

None of them seemed to know what to say. ″In many ways he was the best of us,″ said Merlin at last, but he got no further than that before Bedivere snorted. 

″This coming from a man who once described Harry as the Arch Bitch of Canterbury. Don't you dare eulogize him.″ 

″Well he was,″ Merlin said, not sounding even remotely repentant. ″He was a dreadful old queen at times.″ 

″Remember when he threw his martini on Viscount Falmouth?″ 

″Or when he called Cordelia Layne an interfering cow?″ 

″She deserved that.″ 

″Or when he had a threesome with the Armenian Ambassador and his wife, and then halfway through it they invited the butler, too?″ 

″Or that time in Prague—″ 

″Oh, Christ, I can't even look at a cabbage anymore.″ 

″I thought I was the only one that had that problem.″ 

″No, it's universal.″ 

Eggsy leaned forward, completely entranced by the look of horror that had spread across the faces of half the room. ″What happened in Prague?″ he said. 

They told him about Prague, and Tokyo, and Tanzania, and all the other places where Harry had been and made a spectacle of himself – always getting the job done, in the end, but perhaps a little more flamboyantly than was strictly required. About the time Harry had stopped on his way out of Dodoma to buy a framed butterfly specimen and then ended up in the middle of a robbery and incapacitated three criminals with nothing but a silk tie. About Harry's habit of buying absurd presents for people in his travels, so that all of the knights had hideous magnets and bobblehead dolls and desert snowglobes cluttering up their offices. About Merlin's mug, with the blue ribbon on it – Roxy even pulled out her phone and played him the song it was referencing, about a drunk Scotsman wearing a kilt, gifted with a blue ribbon, and Eggsy laughed so hard that tears streamed down his cheeks. 

They told him about Chester, too, as if the floodgates had opened and everything they'd been holding back came out all at once. Excalibur had chosen him during the cold war and he'd held things together through a couple of very tense years. He'd been strong and ruthless when that was what they needed, what the world needed. But then afterwards he'd never quite lost that ruthlessness, even when the world started to change. He'd hung up the sword on the wall of his office and been sneering and derisive about its supernatural abilities. Interest in the artifacts had waned under his influence, and the relevance of technology and financial manipulation had increased. He and Harry had clashed many times, over the years, about class and gender and priorities – but there had always been a level of respect between them, a mutual understanding. Until it had all gone wrong. 

By the time Daisy was dropped off after nursery, Eggsy was beginning to understand why they'd none of them talked to him about this before. Because it was all wrapped up together, Harry and Chester, the good times and the bad times and the worst of it all when they'd found out that they had been betrayed. They had been in mourning, not just for Harry, but for Chester, too, though none of them would admit it – who would grieve the death of a traitor? – and for something more abstract but no less real, their ability to trust and be trusted, their faith in their mission and in each other. 

No wonder they had clammed up whenever Eggsy came stumbling in. 

Daisy's arrival interrupted Lancelot's retelling of a story about an attempted kidnapping that Harry had apparently foiled by pretending to be a fish salesman. It was decidedly not child-appropriate – but rather than go silent, Roxy switched to asking Daisy to demonstrate some of the new karate moves that she'd learned during their sleepover the night before, and soon they spilled out into the hallway so that all the knights, barring Geraint, could teach her their favorite self-defense tricks. 

Eventually they ordered in pizza and sat around talking about things that weren't Kingsman – music and hobbies and childhood and places they'd visited for pleasure rather than work. 

And after he'd put Daisy to bed, he left Elaine to watch over her and came back with a couple of bottles of scotch. The reminiscences went on into the small hours, and by the time Eggsy finally went to bed he'd learned more about the knights than he had in the last two months all together. Harry, too – his pet peeves, his little kindnesses, his tendency to get hit on in the most unlikely places. His tendency to take people up on their interest, even in the most unlikely places. 

Though he'd tried not to let on, Eggsy had felt more than a little relief at the revelation that Harry was most definitely not straight. It didn't mean he'd be interested in Eggsy, of course, but as Eggsy's eyes fluttered closed, he allowed himself a secret moment of cautious hope. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The song that inspired Merlin's mug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ35SOU9HTM).


	7. Chapter 7

Harry's house was exactly what Eggsy had expected and nothing like what he'd expected. 

From the outside it was everything prim and proper – a posh post code and a bland but impeccably-manicured front garden that was almost certainly maintained by a professional crew. Eggsy held Daisy's hand as they went up the walk.

He had spent two weeks reading through all of Harry's notes about the grail – the ones he'd kept at the manor, anyway. It was hardly two weeks of information, but they'd barely recovered from the hangovers after the night in the hospital wing when there had been a flood of reports regarding potential terrorist activity; Eggsy and Merlin had been nearly run off their feet coordinating the five different Kingsmen who were required to handle the situation. He had snatched glances at Harry's notes in odd moments and then read the last of it in full yesterday, finally, when all that was left of the terrorist situation was the cleanup. There had been no more dreams – Eggsy didn't think there would be any more dreams, not of the magical variety, anyway – and Excalibur hadn't spoken to him again, either. It had even stopped whispering at him. Harry's notes, then, were all he had to go on.

They were fascinating, he had to say that much, but they weren't particularly informative. The grail was little understood and most of what was in there was speculation. It was a cup or a bowl or a plate, it might or might not have been owned by Jesus or by some other saint; it might give those who drank from it eternal life, or curse them to eternal damnation, if they were not pure enough, or do something else as yet unspecified. Kingsman, for all it was an organization directly descending from King Arthur himself, knew little more. The grail had been passed down through its history – mostly locked away in a vault, untouched. It had been used on occasion to heal Kingsmen who were gravely injured, but this was of limited use because no one wanted to take it out into the field and take the chance of losing it, and sometimes it didn't do anything at all. Some Kingsmen had reported that it sang to them. All in all, they seemed to have decided that their mission in regards to the grail was to protect it, and not much else. Eggsy thought this was rather baffling.

And then the grail had gone missing, rather mysteriously, in 1994. Shortly after that, the then-Percival had gone missing as well – he'd left a cryptic note that seemed to indicate that he'd taken it, but not why, and he'd covered his tracks well enough that none of the other Kingsmen of the time (even Harry) had been able to trace him.

Harry's official notes ended there, more or less; it was obvious that he thought he had found a lead all these years later, but he hadn't recorded what it was or where he was intending to go, either out of some lingering paranoia or just bloody-mindedness. But Eggsy thought maybe he'd have left something more at his home and so here he was, on a Tuesday afternoon, standing on the porch with Daisy on one side and Excalibur belted to the other, punching in the code that Merlin had given him.

It had surprised him that the house hadn't been cleared out, even several months after Harry's supposed death. But then again, it hadn't exactly been a sure thing, that death. Perhaps they'd all still been hoping against hope that he'd turn up again someday, walk in the door and grin and say, ″Did you miss me, then, gentlemen?″ Eggsy couldn't blame them.

Inside, the house at first seemed nearly as pristine as the garden. The front hall was all polished wood with several doors leading off it and a staircase leading up to a landing. Eggsy barely had time to get his bearings there, though, before Daisy was tugging him towards one of them – obviously the sitting room, judging by the sofa he could see in a quick glance – and with a shrug he decided that was probably as good a place to start as any. When they passed through the doorway into the sitting room, though, he stopped abruptly.

Every wall was covered with butterflies. They were grouped in sets of six or eight, tastefully framed, though there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to the groupings as far as Eggsy could see. Drab brown with spots shaped like eyes, butter yellow, black and white, flame orange, dazzling indigo blue; some wings bulbous and full and others slim, feathered at the tips, and others shaped like a graceful wave; small and large and enormous, all nestled in amongst each other. Eggsy's gaze flitted helplessly between them, his attention pulled away again before he'd even finished processing whichever one he was looking at. The other knights had mentioned that Harry collected butterflies, but Eggsy certainly hadn't imagined that it would be like this – he hadn't even known that so many different kinds of butterflies even _existed_. 

Daisy tugged her hand free from Eggsy's and went rapidly across to the far wall where she stopped, nose barely an inch from the glass of one of the frames. The movement was enough to break him out of his almost hypnotic fascination.

″Look with your eyes,″ he told her, and Daisy turned just far enough to give him an imperious look. 

″I _know_ ,″ she said, but she folded her hands carefully behind her back. 

Eggsy let his gaze wander back to the butterflies. It made sense, he realized after a moment. Harry liked beautiful things, that much was evident just from his suit alone. And he liked knowledge, collecting it and classifying what he knew, drawing connections. But there was also an element of ruthlessness there, too, an almost casual cruelty that Eggsy found himself uncomfortably aware was probably necessary for a Kingsman. Everything had to come second to the mission, when you were saving the world – but he thought maybe Harry had taken it too far sometimes. Collecting butterflies even though it meant killing them, focusing on the quest for the grail to the exclusion of everything else in his life… When Harry did something, he didn't do it half way. But that wasn't always necessarily a good thing.

Eventually Eggsy forced his gaze away from the riot of colors on the walls and took in the rest of the room. There was a telly, the sofa and an armchair in neutral colors, plus a coffee table and a couple of side tables with lamps on – nothing here, really, that could hold what he was looking for. Casting another glance at Daisy, he slipped back into the hall and through the next doorway into the dining room. There were more butterflies here, though they were interspersed with paintings; the table was set for six, elegant and pristine. Beyond the dining room was the kitchen, not too large but not tiny, either; Eggsy went through the cabinets but didn't find anything other than dishes and some staple foods. Passing back through the dining room he found a utility room with laundry facilities – it was hard to picture Harry doing his own laundry, but Eggsy supposed that even a London cleaners might look oddly at the amount of bloodstained clothes that a Kingsman agent acquired.

Abandoning the utility room, Eggsy found his way back to the hall and pulled open the last door, which led to a shadowed loo. He fumbled around the side of the doorway until he found the light switch, flicked it on and—

″ _Fucking hell_.″

The dog was dead, there was no doubt about that. Dead and stuffed and carefully arranged on a wooden stand hung above the toilet. It was Mr. Pickle – Eggsy would have recognized the dog even without the little plaque underneath, given how many nights he'd spent playing catch with him. There was the way the tip of his right ear folded under itself, the pattern of fur on his right leg. But he was so still, more than Eggsy had ever seen him before, which made the whole thing feel just a bit unreal.

It was weird that Mr. Pickle was dead, to be honest; Eggsy hadn't really given any thought to where the dog must be, if Harry was stuck somewhere. If he weren't so sure Harry was still alive – but he _was_ sure, somehow. He just… knew it. He looked down at Excalibur, then back again to Mr. Pickle.

Still. No wonder Harry had hesitated when Eggsy asked him whether it was just the two of them.

″Harry, you freak,″ Eggsy said under his breath, but it came out so affectionately that he blushed to hear himself. ″Can't believe you keep a dead dog in the loo.″ He realized then that he had been stood staring at a dead dog for nearly a full minute; with a huff, he turned away.

Upstairs he found Harry's bedroom. The bed was made up, tidily, and when Eggsy opened the closet he found everything arranged by color. He checked through Harry's drawers just to be thorough, though he forced himself to be brisk when he hit the one with Harry's pants in it, and then under the bed as well. There was a book on the bedside table, a biography of some old dude or other; Eggsy flipped it open and found that Harry's place was marked neatly with a leather bookmark. After a moment he closed it again and stuffed the book into his pocket, trying not to dwell on the sentiment that led him to do so.

Beyond the bedroom was Harry's study – Eggsy had high hopes of finding something here, so he'd left it for nearly last, but after five minutes of reading the headlines of all the newspapers stuck on the wall and almost half an hour of actually searching through what was there (and a few interruptions to check on Daisy, who had apparently stared at each and every butterfly in turn and then graduated to folding origami figures out of Harry's loo roll), he had found nothing that seemed even remotely related to Percival or the grail. There was a safe embedded in the middle drawer of the desk, but it was unlocked and empty, and another hidden drawer that opened to a Kingsman code but held only an impressive amount of weaponry. The guest bedroom was also a wash, and Eggsy stood for a moment at the top of the stairs after he'd finished searching it, turning a slow circle with his hand on Excalibur's hilt to see if there was anything he'd missed, or if the sword would give him some sort of sign. There wasn't, and it didn't.

He went back down the stairs, dispirited, and into the loo where Daisy was still playing, having lined up all her origami figures in some mysteriously specific order across the edge of the sink and the back of the toilet.

″Nice work, luv,″ Eggsy said. He stared at them for a moment, then lifted his gaze to Mr. Pickle who looked back at him with cheerful incomprehension. He supposed he could sort of understand why Harry had kept him like this – it wasn't entirely unlike Daisy's tendency to hang on to her toys even when they were worn almost to pieces. 

″At least he's got you, boy,″ Eggsy said. ″Wherever he is.″ He lifted his hand to stroke Mr. Pickle's head gingerly, but it wasn't as weird as he'd been anticipating. It was just like petting him for real, more or less, though the dog was a little colder like this. On a whim, Eggsy ran his hand down over Mr. Pickle's collar to the tag, like he had done the first time they'd met.

There was something stuck to the back of the tag. 

Eggsy frowned and picked at it with his thumbnail. It was a piece of paper, he realized, folded up very small. After a moment he got the edge loose and pulled the whole thing free, letting it drop into his palm. He unfolded it carefully.

The first sentence was in the Kingsman shorthand, but he'd memorized that and he could read it without needing to refer to the manual. Beyond that, it was backwards, which made Eggsy roll his eyes a little.

'Lloyd's Bank. 67 Old Brompton Rd. Box.'

Underneath was a string of numbers.

\-----

The bank was fairly busy, so Eggsy – in one of his suits, hair gelled back and looking as much like the kind of person who had a safe deposit box as possible – waited with barely-concealed impatience as the teller ahead of him dealt with one woman exchanging currency (pounds for Canadian dollars), an irate man complaining about a bounced check fee, and a young woman opening a new account. 

He had dreamed of Harry the previous night – still not a standing stones dream, but a garden-variety dream of the sort that he hadn't experienced in quite a while. They had been in an anonymously lush bed, pale blue silk sheets and darker blue hangings above, a soft light surrounding them from a source that Eggsy couldn't see. Harry had kissed him, touched him, taken him apart with patient thoroughness until he was boneless and gasping, and just when he'd started to recover and rolled over to return the favor he had woken in his own bed, sweaty and sticky and aching for something he didn't dare try to name.

At last he reached the head of the queue, only to be sent to another desk down at the end of the room. It was an awkward moment – he was definitely out of his depth here, not having had much experience with safe deposit boxes before now. He'd never owned anything that was worth this kind of effort and expense to protect it, to be honest. And while he was becoming more comfortable and friendly with the other knights, he hadn't felt like he could ask any of them for advice. There was no one he could imagine taking Harry's mentorship role, not for something like this. Not when he was supposed to be leading them. 

If he'd been able to talk to Harry the night before, he could have got all the advice he needed, probably in painfully-thorough detail. Then again, if he'd been able to talk to Harry, he wouldn't have to go through any of this at all.

Eggsy sighed, dredging up his most charming smile once again, and slid the paper across the desk to the blandly-inquisitive agent. 

″Yes, hello, I'd like to visit my box, please. This is the number.″

″Name?″ the agent said, fingers moving rapidly across the keys of her computer terminal.

_Shit_ , Eggsy thought. Yeah, he'd really like to have had a thirty second introduction to 'posh people banking activities' starting about, oh, half an hour ago.

The trouble was, he didn't know which name Harry would have used. Not his own, certainly, given that he was trying to keep all of this under the radar. But there were hundreds of aliases to choose from; his research into Harry's notes had revealed at least twenty that he could remember off the top of his head. There was no particular pattern to them, either – best practice, according to Merlin – so he really had no way of choosing between John Mitchell or Eric Smith or Edwin Abney, not to mention any of the ones he'd forgotten or didn't know about at all.

″Name?″ said the agent again; she flicked him a glance that was beginning to look interested rather than bored. ″I'll need your name, sir.″

Eggsy opened his mouth. ″Pickle,″ he blurted, not actually knowing what was going to come out until he heard himself say it. ″It's, er. Tristan Pickle.″

_I am an idiot,_ he thought. 

It was one of his favorite memories of Harry, that night spent memorizing forms of address, but he didn't have any reason to think that this was an alias Harry actually used anywhere, much less the one he would have used here. Still, he'd said it now. God help him if she asked for identification.

The agent's expression was bland but her eyes indicated that she was assessing him. Eggsy watched as she typed the name into the computer. Then all at once her shoulders eased. ″Certainly, sir. Right this way, Mr. Pickle.″

_The fuck?_ Eggsy thought, and then, astonished, _Guess that was the right answer._

He followed the agent down the hall to a small room with a table and a pair of chairs, trying not to let his incredulity show on his face. _Harry… You are definitely a little bit mental about that dog, you know that, yeah?_ Then again, Eggsy _had_ found the box number stuck to the back of Mr. Pickle's collar. Maybe putting the dog's name on the bank account wasn't as absurd as it had seemed at first.

The agent left him there, returning a few minutes later with a small metal box. It was wide but thin, big enough to hold documents but not nearly big enough to hold the grail itself.

″Please feel free to take all the time you need,″ she said. ″Just let me know when you're finished.″

″Thank you,″ Eggsy said, with passable civility, but his eyes were locked on the box. When the door closed behind her, he sat down, then reached out and cupped it in his hands. It was cool to the touch, as if it had been somewhere even more heavily air-conditioned than this. 

For a moment he almost couldn't bear to open it. What if this didn't have anything to do with the grail at all? Harry's little scrap of paper hadn't exactly been forthcoming about its purpose, so it was possibly that the box held some other secret he'd wanted to keep – some compromising photographs from youth, perhaps (although after all the stories Eggsy had heard about Harry, he couldn't think of anything that would be embarrassing enough to make Harry keep it secret), or a handful of letters, or his will. Eggsy _really_ hoped it wasn't his will. 

At last he sucked in a breath and flipped up the top edge of the box. Inside was a piece of paper, rolled up into an honest-to-god scroll and tied neatly with a thin, golden ribbon. Eggsy huffed out an exasperated laugh at Harry's sense of drama and pulled the ribbon off, then unrolled the paper. 

It was… a map, perhaps. The paper was light, almost translucent; thin, hand-drawn pencil lines were scattered across it, some nearly straight but most of them wavering or curved or jagged. Some almost looked like they wanted to be shapes, but had been left half-finished. Nothing was labeled, either, though Harry had circled three apparently empty spaces and drawn a line from each of them to a note on one side which read 'the Grail?', which at least told Eggsy which way was up. It didn't look like any kind of map that Eggsy had seen before – but if it wasn't a map, he didn't know what else it could be. The product of a bored half-hour's doodling, maybe. 

_Fuck's sake, Harry,_ he thought. _Couldn't you have just written down an address?_

But there was a warm bud of hope beginning to bloom in the center of his chest nonetheless. Somehow, despite everything, he was on the right track. Even if he hadn't the faintest idea what to do next, he was closer to Harry than before. That had to be worth something.

_I'll take it to Merlin,_ Eggsy decided. He rolled the paper up again and re-tied the ribbon in a bow that was almost as neat as Harry's had been, then tucked it away in his inside jacket pocket. _Must be some sort of super search he can do, and then we can decide where to go from there._


	8. Chapter 8

″What do you mean, there's no match?″

″I feel sure you still speak English,″ Merlin said, sitting down in the chair in front of Eggsy's desk. ″I've run it against every database of maps that we have – and our collection is extensive. Ordinance survey, topographical, demographic, political, historical – the British Library database is particularly fine – weather, climate, astronomical, butterfly migratory patterns, Google maps—″

″Right, yes, okay, okay,″ Eggsy said, waving a hand to cut off the litany. ″It ain't that I don't believe you. It's just… it's got to mean _something_.″

″I know, lad,″ said Merlin, softening. ″I can only suppose he thought he was being clever, doing it like this.″

″Tosser,″ Eggsy muttered. He glared at Excalibur where it hung on the wall.

″Aye.″ Merlin slid the paper across the desk. ″I've made sufficient copies of this, so I thought you might want the original back.″

″Thanks, I guess.″ He rolled up the paper and set it aside.

″Bedivere wants to see you,″ Merlin continued. ″He's waiting outside.″

″Yeah, all right,″ Eggsy said gloomily. ″Send 'im in.″

He didn't hear Merlin say anything in the hallway, but a moment later when Bedivere came in, his expression was, mercifully, completely professional. He dropped a file folder onto the desk and sat.

″New intelligence from Kay's mission in Edinburgh,″ he said. ″Looks like the outfit that Geraint was investigating in Manchester has set up there as well.″

Eggsy sat up. ″Doing what?″

″Probably research. It's the wrong kind of traffic to be purely a storage operation – occasional trucks going in and out, but small ones, and their energy usage is high, especially on hot days. They also have a backup generator, so, probably something that needs refrigeration, which would fit with what we know already about the drug.″

″Good, good,″ Eggsy said. ″What do we know about their computer setup? Anything we can get into?″

″Not yet – they're certainly good enough to stop a casual attempt, and I didn't want to go full-on in case it drew more attention than we wanted. But I could pass it to the tech wizards if you think we should make a serious attempt. Or…″ He leaned forward. ″… we could go in and blow their fucking heads off and get the data from inside.″

It was pretty clear which option Bedivere would prefer – and Eggsy didn't blame him. He didn't like the thought of those bastards still out there, peddling their shit to kids and to the desperate. And after what they'd done to Geraint… Still, going in with so little information wasn't a risk he was willing to take. If they had more tricks like the ones in Manchester up their sleeves, Kingsman could be in serious trouble. Geraint had just about recovered from the poison and was eager to go out again, but it had been touch and go for longer than Eggsy cared to think about. 

He sighed. ″No, let's see if we can get more out of them first,″ he said. ″Pass it to the wizards and tell 'em I want protocol seven. If we can make 'em think we're the Chinese then it'll at least divert some attention.″

″Yes, sir,″ Bedivere said, sitting back. His expression showed a faint disappointment but no obvious resentment. Eggsy wondered, not for the first time, what the man really thought of him. He had felt, ever since that night with all of them gathered around Geraint's bedside, as if the distance between himself and the knights was finally beginning to close – but there was still a sense that what he saw of them was what they chose to let him see. 

″That ain't to say we can't plan with what we have, mind,″ Eggsy continued. ″Give me a 44-S on it in the next couple of days and we'll see what the wizards turn up, yeah?″ He didn't particularly want to _read_ another Form 44-S (it was the 'proposed action' form and the S stood for 'short version' – Eggsy pretty much only ever asked for the short version, since the long form was twenty six pages and had a number of notes like 'attach Schedule D here') but needs must. 

″Of course,″ Bedivere said. ″Will that be all?″

″Yeah—″ Eggsy said, and then, ″Wait, hang on.″ He reached for the rolled up paper and spread it out on the desk. ″This look familiar to you at all?″

Bedivere pushed his folder aside and leaned over to study the paper. ″Nothing comes to mind,″ he said. ″Is this from Galahad?″

″Yeah,″ said Eggsy. He had noticed over the past few weeks that sometimes the others referred to Harry as Harry and sometimes as Galahad, though as yet he hadn't been able to figure out if there was a pattern to it. ″Merlin's seen it, but it doesn't seem to match any known map system. And if it isn't a map, then I sure as fuck don't know what it is.″

″Hmm.″ Bedivere traced one of the lines with a fingertip. ″It almost looks like dance notation, perhaps? Though why that would be associated with the grail, I don't know.″

″You were here when Percival took it, weren't you?″ Eggsy asked. 

″Yes. Only a year into my time as a Kingsman, as I recall. It was all hushed up even amongst the knights proper.″ He sat up and fixed Eggsy with a thoughtful look. ″Much as we have done with Chester, I suppose. Perhaps we ought to re-think the strategy.″

Eggsy kept the sentence ″Too fuckin' right″ inside his head, but only by means of substantial effort. Instead he said, mildly, ″It's worth thinkin' about. Keeping secrets… it can work against you as much as for you, yeah?″ He hadn't realized until years later that so many of his teachers had been trying to find ways to help him – they'd kept hinting, but he'd been too afraid of Dean's threats to do anything but hide his bruises. If only he'd told, things might have changed. It was water under the bridge now and of course he'd been too young to understand, but he still regretted it. ″I ain't saying we shouldn't be a secret organization and all that.″

″But we can take it too far,″ Bedivere said, nodding. He looked down at the paper again. ″As Harry seems to have done. Yes, I take your point.″

They were back to 'Harry' again, Eggsy noticed. ″Yeah,″ he said, and then looked down at the paper and sighed. ″All right, well, if you think of something, let me know. In the meantime, let's see what we can find out about Edinburgh.″

″Yes, sir,″ Bedivere said.

″Dismissed,″ Eggsy said, because he knew by now that if he didn't say it the knights would stand around awkwardly waiting to be told that they could go. Bedivere stood and departed with a nod. When he'd gone, Eggsy rolled up Harry's paper once again and tucked it away in his jacket pocket, then turned to the folder of intelligence that Bedivere had left him with grim determination.

\-----

A week and a half passed, and Eggsy made no progress with Harry's paper. He had shown it to each of the knights as they passed in and out of the manor, barring only Bors who was now away on a deep cover mission in Paraguay, and received a variety of suggestions. Bedivere's idea of dance notation had put Eggsy in mind of musical notes, and he wasted three hours trying to see if he could match the map to some sort of sheet music before concluding that if that was what Harry had in mind, he'd given far too little information to allow anyone to make the connection. The other suggestions proved fruitless as well.

At the manor, the wizard team worked on hacking into the facility in Edinburgh; to keep Eggsy from asking after their progress every ten minutes Merlin gave him a huge packet of budgeting paperwork and told him not to come back until he'd finished with it. Working through it kept him occupied for several days, and coming up with six different preliminary attack plans on the facility filled another two, but despite the activity he could feel his frustration beginning to build. 

It felt like he was wasting time, like they all were. Somewhere out there drugs and guns were hitting the streets. Somewhere out there a rich nutcase was coming up with new and inventive rich nutcase ideas, many of which were destined to end badly for the rest of humanity. Somewhere out there Harry was stuck doing fuck knows what, trapped forever unless somebody stumbled across him, and the possibility of that seemed less likely every day.

And all Eggsy could do was sit here and shuffle numbers around. Of course, it had to be done – all those planes and suits and guns and tech didn't just appear out of thin air. Kingsman had a fuckload of money, sure, but that didn't mean they could afford to waste it. If there was one thing Eggsy knew, it was just how fast money could disappear if you weren't careful. But the inaction chafed nonetheless, a spring tightening in his shoulders and stomach and legs each day that he sat and did what felt like nothing. Even long workouts in the manor's gym couldn't strip it away. 

At night, after Daisy was in bed, he kept himself busy by reading the book he'd picked up off of Harry's bedside table, which turned out to be about King Ludwig I. Occasionally it was hard going – Eggsy couldn't keep all the different German names straight in his head – but overall it was more interesting than he'd anticipated. He'd never have guessed that a king could get up to so much. When did they find the time? Maybe they just got as bored of budgeting as he did.

It made him feel a little closer to Harry, reading his book. Like they could be thinking about the same things, Eggsy here at Kingsman and Harry… wherever the fuck Harry was. Not exactly the same thoughts, of course – Harry might be missing the book, perhaps wondering how it ended or arguing with the bits of it that he could remember, while Eggsy on the other hand was mostly experiencing a sort of appreciative disbelief about Ludwig's antics and skimming over all of the stuff about the wider social implications. If Harry were here, Eggsy would have loved to have a conversation with him about the book. But Harry wasn't here. 

He wasn't in Eggsy's head, either. When Eggsy slept, his dreams were only ordinary dreams: sometimes sexual, sometimes strange, sometimes both. Always lonely – and when he woke, the dark silence of his bedroom felt oppressive rather than peaceful.

\-----

It was Tuesday when the wizards cracked the security at the Edinburgh facility. Merlin paged Eggsy with the words 'We're in' and Eggsy scrambled into his office to stand over his shoulder as he worked his way through the file system, copying what he could.

″Do they know you're in?″ Eggsy ventured. He was paging through the files on his tablet as they appeared on Kingsman's server, flagging anything that might be useful – floor plans, a database that looked to be keypad codes for internal doors, electrical system information. 

″Not yet, I don't think, but it won't be long,″ said Merlin, fingers moving swiftly across the keyboard. ″There's only so much I can do to muddy the waters. Perhaps half an hour, up to two hours if they're not paying attention.″

″Who's closest, then? Geraint and Caradoc still?″

″Yes, I believe so.″

Eggsy pulled up their comms. ″Gentlemen, we're in the system in Edinburgh. Can you be ready to go immediately?″

″Yes, sir,″ said Caradoc.

″Fuck yes, sir,″ said Geraint.

″Good,″ he said. ″I'm sending you material as we get it but it looks like Plan Blue is going to be the most direct.″

They worked in silence for a while, Merlin copying files and Eggsy feeding the important ones on remotely. ″I think that's everything I can get now,″ Merlin said at last. ″There's still their internal cameras but those are on a separate server and once I go after that, they're going to notice. My recommendation is to save it in case we need it.″

″All right,″ Eggsy said. ″Gentlemen, where are you?″

″About ten minutes out,″ Caradoc said. 

″Good. Let me know when you're in position.″

Eggsy fought to control himself as they waited. It was a relief to have them doing something at last – and yet now that they _were_ doing something, he couldn't help being a bit nervous about it all. He had overseen several missions since Geraint's disastrous incident in Manchester, but they had all been fairly straightforward 'find this potential terrorist and kill him' sorts of things and to be honest, none of the knights had really needed much handling in those cases. And there had been too many of them too quickly for his nerves to do more than twitch – not like this, where he'd had far more time to anticipate what could possibly go wrong.

His leg was jittering up and down; Eggsy could see Merlin watching him out of the corner of his eye and knew he was drawing attention to himself. It was a distraction that Merlin certainly didn't need, a distraction that all the other knights were too professional to let indulge in. If Harry were here in this seat he'd have been as tightly-contained as ever. But knowing all of that didn't mean Eggsy could make himself stop. It was the waiting that he couldn't stand – a week and a half of waiting and the last ten minutes seemed far worse than what had come before. 

Eventually Merlin reached over and muted their end of the comms. 

″If you have concerns about their capabilities for this mission—″ he started.

″Fuck no, it ain't that,″ Eggsy said, startled. ″It's just...″ He hesitated, then burst out, ″I should be out there!″ He set his hands onto the edge of the desk to keep himself from punching it. ″How the fuck do you do this all the time, sending 'em out and knowing that every time you do, something could go wrong and they might not come back? Geraint almost got fucking killed, and here I am sending him right back to those same bastards.″ 

″Arthur—″

″Oh, stuff Arthur up your arse,″ Eggsy said vehemently. ″You all keep calling me that and for what? Because some rusty old bit of tat said so? Why the fuck do any of you even listen to me, when I ain't gone out there and done any of it myself? Prob'ly couldn't even if I tried.″

″On the contrary,″ Merlin said sharply. ″I am sure you'd have made an excellent knight, Eggsy, but the truth is that you're simply too valuable to send out into the field.″

″Valuable.″ Eggsy snorted. ″For what?″

″To Daisy, for one thing,″ said Merlin, and it took the wind out of Eggsy's sails all at once, as any mention of her usually did. ″And to the rest of us. I don't think you understand just how—″

The comms clicked on, and Merlin shut his mouth on the rest of the sentence. 

″Arthur, Merlin, we're in position,″ said Caradoc.

″Permission to blow the place sky high?″ said Geraint.

Eggsy breathed out and un-muted the microphone. ″Permission granted.″

\-----

It took six hours, but they closed the facility down. The information that they'd gained from the device Geraint had brought back from Manchester meant that Merlin could disable the entire set of them once Geraint and Caradoc reached the perimeter; there were guards, too, but those were easily dealt with. Once inside, they took the control center first – only a third of the gang hierarchy was present, but Eggsy considered it a win since this included the second in command, now bound and gagged and on his way to a Kingsman detention facility in the back of a van – and then the handful of scientists on site. Some of them had even been glad to surrender. After that it was a simple matter to gather what information they could, take samples of the chemicals and destroy the rest. 

They were beautiful to watch, Caradoc and Geraint, like one of those two part farm machines that Eggsy had seen in Youtube videos (there had been a time in his life when watching videos of machines was the only thing that would keep Daisy from screaming) where one half of it cut the wheat and the other half bound it into sheaves. Not that anything about this operation was as simple as that, of course, but there was a pattern to the way they worked together nonetheless – Geraint in front, smaller, angrier (though the anger was tightly-controlled), pushing through the defences, and Caradoc just behind at his right shoulder, watchful, catching anything that Geraint missed. 

It made Eggsy wish, once again, that he could be out there with them. Not just to be part of the action, but also because he'd never had that kind of partnership with anyone. He'd only had his mum and Dean and Daisy, all of whom made for rather one-sided relationships, and now Merlin and the other knights, which were just as one-sided, albeit very different. If he'd been a knight himself, he rather thought he and Roxy would have been a good team. Maybe he and Harry could have been an even better one – or was that just wishful thinking? He'd never know the answer.

The thought came during a lull in the action – when Caradoc and Geraint moved on, Eggsy forced himself to push it aside. 

\-----

That night Eggsy abandoned Excalibur on top of the dresser and slumped wearily into bed, his throat raw from speaking instructions and information through the comms and his shoulders high and tight from the effort of keeping himself calm.

He had checked in on Daisy after bidding goodnight to Elaine and found her asleep in her bed, one hand screwed up into a tiny fist in the blankets; he regretted not being home with her after school but it couldn't have been helped. This weekend they would have some time together, barring any disasters, and he hoped it would be enough. 

He wanted nothing more now than to sleep himself, but he forced himself to pick up Harry's book anyway. He hadn't got as far as the leather bookmark – his own place was marked with one of Daisy's origami animals – but he was making steady progress and it had become something like ritual to end his day reading a page or two. Ritual, or perhaps obligation. Just one more thing he couldn't bring himself to let go of.

Three paragraphs in, though, and his eyes began to glaze over. He dropped the book down onto the bed, fingers limp. Perhaps he could skip just one night's worth of reading.

The book landed spine down and flopped open to a page that Eggsy hadn't yet reached. Not where Harry's bookmark was, but a little further on. The spine was bent just there, as if it were a page that Harry had referred to so often that he'd flattened it out. Eggsy reached for the book, and nearly had it closed when his eye was caught by the illustration that took up the right hand page of the spread.

It was [a map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/39/Ebstorfer-stich2.jpg) – but not like any of the maps that Eggsy had seen before. Nearly half the world was represented, but whole cities were encompassed by a drawing of a single castle, or a man with a sword fighting some sort of fantastical animal. There were roads, but they were no more than connections between cities, and some of them ended in stylized mountains or flames. Some of the shapes looked familiar.

Eggsy shoved the open book onto the bedside table and stumbled out of bed. His suit jacket was hung in the closet and it took him a moment to pull out Harry's piece of paper without crinkling it. He carried it back to the bed with shaking hands and sat, then drew the open book into his lap and spread the paper out on top of the illustration. The paper was thin enough that he could just make out the lines underneath.

It matched.

The half-finished curve just there was a lion's tail; that wavering line was a series of small hills between cities; three triangles grouped together were the roofs of the towers of a castle. Not everything from the map in the book had been traced onto Harry's map, but it was enough for Eggsy to be sure that this was what he had been looking for. The three places that Harry had circled were words: Anglia, Liguria, Jerusalem. It was, without a doubt, the most ridiculous way of conveying information that Eggsy had ever encountered.

″Fucking hell, Harry,″ Eggsy said. ″Could you have made this any more complicated?″

He was too tired to feel triumphant, though by rights he ought to have been. One step closer – but there would be another barrier, he was sure, and another, and another. Maybe the grail wasn't out there to be found; maybe Harry was dead and all of this was just some ridiculous supernatural runaround, an obstacle course set by Excalibur to make sure that he was worthy. Although why he needed to be worthy of completing a quest just so that he could sit at a desk and do budgeting all day, he wasn't sure. He lifted his head and let his gaze settle on the sword, lying placidly across the top of the dresser. ″You oughtta tell your boy Galahad to cut this shit out,″ Eggsy told it.

The sword didn't answer, but it was a smug sort of not-answering that said, pretty clearly, ″ _You_ tell him, when you find him.″

″I fucking will,″ Eggsy said angrily. Paper crackled under his palm and he realized suddenly that he was crumpling Harry's map in his fist. He looked down and smoothed it out again with shaking fingers. ″I'll fucking find you, Harry. I ain't giving up just because you've got delusions of grandeur.″

The map also didn't answer, but at least this time it didn't feel like it was thinking at him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [More about the map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebstorf_Map).


	9. Chapter 9

Eggsy had run into a brick wall.

Well, he hadn't actually run into it, as such – but it _was_ a literal brick wall. In fact, the whole building was brick, a little square space no more than thirty foot by thirty foot square, tucked in at the corner of an abandoned industrial park of concrete block warehouses in Silvertown. The land had an unusual history; it had been part of the property that abutted it to the west, a chemical factory, then split off in the mid-eighties when a PLC had purchased it from the factory owners, sheathed the whole thing in black sheeting, renovated it under cover of darkness, and then disappeared one morning with the sheeting removed to reveal that the building no longer had any sort of doors or windows whatsoever. 

It was – and had remained through the years – merely a box made of bricks, a mystery both physical and metaphorical. The PLC that owned it was duly registered, all fees paid, but the ownership was obscured by the fact that it was part of a chain of companies that appeared to double back upon each other, all with anodyne names that gave nothing away. Surveillance records were equally unavailing, since all the surrounding property was monitored privately by the industrial park, but they'd more or less gone bust and hadn't bothered for years. Utility records did seem to indicate that it used minimal power and water, with occasional increases to indicate that at least something was happening inside, but that was all Eggsy had been able to determine.

In short, it was a complete mystery. Eggsy didn't even know if it was the place he had been looking for – but it was, technically, located at the prior site of the Jerusalem Chemical Works, at the corner of Anglia St. and Liguria Rd., and that was the closest thing he had been able to identify that matched the three names on Harry's map.

It had taken him only a few hours to locate the place using Merlin's map search program. To be honest, he'd set the thing running and then turned to other projects, thinking it would take days to return a result. When it beeped at him later in the day he'd spent three minutes trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. But when the penny dropped his heart had started to race and he'd abandoned everything else in favor of a feverish search through the corporate and financial records of the property.

This had lasted all afternoon, only to be interrupted by the alarm telling him it was time to pick up Daisy – but he couldn't leave her with Elaine two nights in a row, not when it wasn't necessary. Harry wasn't going anywhere… literally.

He had struggled to focus on Daisy's string of babbled anecdotes about school, fumbled his way through dinner, then pulled himself together just in time to read the traditional bedtime story, because a half-hearted story just wasn't going to cut it. Daisy deserved his full attention, he knew that. 

But there was a burning in his veins that he couldn't extinguish, an angry sort of impatience to be done with Harry and Excalibur and all of their complicated machinations. When he had first joined Kingsman he'd been drawn in by the glamor of a secret spy organization, the hidden base and the clever weapons and the tech toys and the sleek suits. Now, though, it all seemed a bit overdone. Necessary, most of it – the guns and the tech especially – but any joy he'd found in it had gone. 

The quest, too, was beginning to lose its luster. It had been so long since he'd spoken to Harry that he had begun to lose confidence in the friendship they'd built during the dreams. What if he found Harry and they were nothing more than King and Knight to each other? What if they didn't even manage that much? The rest of the knights had taken quite some time to warm up to him – some of them still hadn't thawed more than they had that night in the hospital wing. To see that distance and disdain on Harry's face wasn't exactly something Eggsy was looking forward to.

Still, he knew he couldn't give up. But he wanted it to be done with so that he could move on, so that he could sleep at night knowing that he'd succeeded or failed. No more waiting.

And so here he was, first thing in the morning, standing in front of a brick wall. He was dressed in his own clothes for once – not wanting to look as fantastically out of place among the abandoned warehouses as a suit would have made him – but with Excalibur hung at his left side; it was more awake than it had been in weeks and its presence was a faint hum in the back of Eggsy's mind. 

The trouble was, after forty five minutes of standing here, he still had no idea how to get in.

He had tried prodding the bricks in various combinations – Morse code for Kingsman and for Galahad, a rough approximation of the Kingsman symbol, the passcode of the safe in Harry's office, even the sequence to open Diagon Alley in _Harry Potter_. He had tried pushing every single brick in the wall, even the ones where he'd had to climb onto a nearby bin to reach. He had tried speaking aloud, in case there was some hidden microphone and a code word (he'd tried Kingsman and Galahad and 'this is Arthur' and various other things, even 'Tristan Pickle'). He had tried touching the tip of Excalibur to the brick in different places. He'd even tried kicking it, although this last had been less of a calculated attempt and more frustration.

It was as he was hopping on one foot and cursing Harry to hell and back that he heard a footfall.

Eggsy whirled around, settling onto both feet with a hidden wince. He hadn't seen anyone here as yet – there wasn't supposed to be anyone, as far as the payroll of the industrial park was concerned. The buildings had been long since stripped of anything not nailed down (and even a few things that _had_ been nailed down), and there was not nearly enough left to justify the expense of a security guard.

But the man who came around the corner certainly gave the impression of being one. Eggsy took him in at a glance: thin, with grey hair, neatly-pressed uniform, worn truncheon slung from an equally-worn belt, polished black work boots. He was old – older than a security guard ought to have been – but it wasn't unheard of for companies to pension off older workers to jobs like this, places where it was virtually guaranteed that nothing exciting was going to happen. Still, Eggsy wasn't entirely easy with this assessment. Something about it didn't quite add up, although he couldn't put his finger on what. 

"Help you, sir?" the man said diffidently. His eyes flicked down to Eggsy's side and Eggsy remembered abruptly that he had Excalibur hanging from his belt.

He opened his mouth to politely decline the assistance, mentally running through his options for getting rid of the man without violence. He had a Kingsman watch prepared with a couple of amnesia darts, of course, but it would be better if he could simply convince the man to go away. And yet—

What harm would it do to ask? 

Eggsy had asked people for all sorts of things over the years – he'd had to, raising Daisy on his own. He'd asked for small things – napkins and paper towels and wet wipes and spare juice boxes – and logistical things – for people to hold the door to the lift when he had her in a stroller, for access to a toilet so that he could change her diaper – and even big things, the hardest of all – putting himself on the registry at the food pantry, asking his boss for unexpected days off when Daisy got sick. Sometimes he resented it, he couldn't deny that. He was proud. He'd done the best he could with what he had, and he wanted that to be enough, but it wasn't. And so he had asked every time anyway, because Daisy was worth more than his pride.

He hadn't always got what he asked for. Even after the SIM cards massacre there had been plenty of people who were only out for themselves. But sometimes – most times – people had come through. Eggsy had done handyman work for half the council estate before he got the job at the garage, and he knew it wasn't nearly enough to pay back for what he and Daisy had received from his neighbors in the days after the massacre. At Kingsman he'd never felt comfortable enough to ask… but perhaps that was because to them he wasn't just Eggsy Unwin, single parent. He was Arthur. He wasn't supposed to need help.

He needed it here, though. And Harry, too, was worth more than his pride.

"Don't s'pose you know how to get in here," he said, and then sighed. "If there even is a way to get in here."

The guard's posture stiffened. "What d'you want to do that for?" he asked. 

"I'm—" Eggsy hesitated, then plumped for a version of the truth. "—looking for a friend. He went missing a while ago and he left a note that… well, I guess it led me here." 

"Funny sort place to end up, looking for a friend," the guard said suspiciously.

Eggsy huffed out a laugh. "You don't have to tell me that, mate. But he's a funny sort of friend. Bit of a drama queen, if you know what I mean."

The guard regarded him for a long moment. At last he stepped closer; Eggsy hurriedly lifted a hand to his watch, cursing himself for getting complacent, but the man only moved past him to the wall of bricks. He reached up and touched one in a way Eggsy couldn't quite see; the brick moved under his hand, sinking back into the wall. Eggsy was sure he'd pressed that one, but obviously there was a trick to it. The guard touched another brick, and then another – there was no obvious logic to the sequence and yet he moved through it without hesitation and each of the bricks sank backwards with a faint grinding noise. 

When he had pressed fifteen or so bricks, the guard stepped back and Eggsy watched in open-mouthed amazement as a whole section of the wall sank inwards and then slid sideways, revealing a narrow space that opened into a shadowed hallway. It was not unlike Eggsy's first taste of Kingsman proper, that moment when dressing room three had sunk into the floor and taken him down to the warren of rooms that was the London base. Goosebumps prickled up his arms; it was an uncomfortable reminder that perhaps he wasn't as inured to the glamour of it all as he'd thought, and after a moment he shook himself, hard. 

There was a light switch just visible on the left wall. Eggsy took a step forward, and then another, then stopped just before his feet could cross the threshold. He reached out and flipped the switch upwards. A set of fluorescent bulbs flickered on above him, revealing the rest of the hallway. The walls were white plaster and the floor was a sort of grey-speckled industrial lino that Eggsy associated with his school days. The hall was only a few feet long, and empty, and at the far end of it was a closed door.

The way forward seemed clear, easy – too easy. Eggsy turned to ask the guard whether he'd actually been inside and found that the man had, somehow, disappeared.

"Oh, brilliant work, Unwin," Eggsy muttered. "Top of the class in situational awareness, you are." He turned back and began scanning the hallway for any sign of a trap, but found nothing – no obvious trip wires or lasers or anything of that sort. He scooped a rock up off the ground and tossed it through the doorway, only to have it clatter to the floor without any particular effect. He stared into the hallway a moment longer, then huffed out a breath and stepped in.

As soon as he'd passed the doorway machinery hummed into life behind him. Eggsy whirled sharply, but the bricks were already beginning to close up and he had only seconds to decide whether to jump back through or stay and see what he could find. If he stayed, he might be trapped for fuck knows how long – but if he left, he didn't think he'd be able to get back in again, certainly not without the security guard's help. 

At his side, Excalibur's humming was louder now, almost eager. Eggsy put a hand to the hilt, then took a deep breath and stayed where he was.

When the whir of machinery had stopped and he was closed in, he examined his surroundings in more detail. The hallway was as uninteresting close-up as it had been from outside. The plaster walls were just plaster; the unattractive lino was just unattractive lino. The door at the end of the hall was, to all appearances, just a door. It didn't even have a lock – Eggsy reached for the knob and it turned under his hand. He pulled on it gently.

The door opened into another room, with similar walls and flooring that stretched back to what must be the far edge of the building. The room appeared to be a sort of archive – shelves lining each side were stacked high with various objects, and at the far end were a table and chairs, also half buried in stuff, and a drinking fountain that bubbled faintly in the corner. But Eggsy could spare no more than half a second's attention to any of this, because in the middle of the room was Harry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're in the home stretch now...


	10. Chapter 10

For a moment Eggsy thought he might be dreaming, so similar was Harry's pose to the one he had seen upon stepping into the standing stones all those months ago. The same unnatural stillness, his hands caught reaching out towards one of the shelves – the same look of pain twisting across his face. The same suit. And yet as Eggsy walked towards him, he could see that there was something indefinably different about about Harry here, now. Perhaps it was just the light, flickering faintly from the fluorescent bulbs overhead, but he fancied that Harry looked just a little bit more alive than he had in that first dream, a little bit less grey. 

Something tight in Eggsy's chest eased just a little. It had been so long since he'd seen Harry's face that he thought he might have forgotten what Harry actually looked like, conjured up some impossibly-handsome face like a fairy-tale Prince Charming to hang all his hopes on. But no, Harry was actually that good-looking. 

And now it was all rushing back, all the feelings he'd begun to question: the thrill of being close (even like this), the way proximity made Eggsy feel hot and cold all at once. He wanted Harry to look at him the way he sometimes had in those dreams – soft, maybe exasperated a little, but fond despite himself. He wanted Harry to look at him the way he had in the _other_ kind of dreams – cheeks flushed and lips parted, pupils blown wide and dark. He wanted to see Harry at work, dark and honed and deadly; wanted to see him at home in neatly-pressed pajamas, slumped on the sofa in golden afternoon sunlight with a book in his hands. He wanted Harry to be proud of him.

It had been easy to fall in love with Harry in his dreams. Eggsy was pretty sure it wouldn't take much for him to fall in love again in real life, either. He took another automatic step closer, then stopped and forced himself to take in the rest of the room in more detail.

The place was filled with cups.

They were stacked on every available surface, two and three deep depending on the space: goblets of glittering gold and ice pale silver and tarnishing iron and carved jade, intricately-painted teacups, rough-hewn wood cups, silk-smooth wooden chalices that looked like they had been grown directly from the tree all in one piece and then dropped like a ripe fruit, pint glasses with etched names of breweries both familiar and unfamiliar, crystal tumblers, sippy cups, mugs, cheap plastic celebratory football-logo cups in an array of horrifying colors. It reminded him of Harry's butterfly collection – the sense that everything had been gathered deliberately but then placed in an equally deliberate chaos. 

_Had_ Harry put all this here? Gathered all of these up like they were pieces of the puzzle he was trying to solve? Or had he found the room just like this, as Eggsy had found it, slipped inside and been caught? Was the grail in here somewhere, or had Harry thought it was? Was that what he had been reaching for?

Looking around produced no answers, however, and after a moment of bafflement Eggsy pushed the thoughts away. None of that mattered, not now. What mattered was waking Harry.

He had thought about this – of course he had. Harry _had_ to be trapped somewhere, and since Eggsy had dreamed of him frozen, it just seemed obvious that he would be frozen in the real world, too. Eggsy had prepared for other possibilities, but it was this one that he'd kept coming back to, night after night, lying in his new, still too-soft bed and trying to fit himself to the role of hero.

He wouldn't do it with a kiss. Not that he hadn't considered it, but he could hear Harry's voice in his head at the thought: "A dreadful cliché, my dear boy. Do try to think of something more interesting." A different voice in the back of his head suggested that he experiment and see if he could do it by giving Harry a good slap on the arse, because if it worked Harry's reaction would be fucking priceless. But no, no, that probably wasn't the way to go about it.

Eggsy touched Excalibur's hilt again, but aside from the now almost feverish hum, there was no response. However he was to help Harry, he'd have to do it himself.

He stepped forward and looked into Harry's eyes for a long moment. It was hard to make himself look at the expression of pain in Harry's face, but Eggsy didn't dare look away in case he missed the moment when something changed. _If_ something changed. 

He reached up and curled his hands over Harry's hands.

Nothing happened. 

Then warmth, blooming under his hand. Pink rising in Harry's cheeks, not quite a flush but something more than what had been there already. An improbable breeze ruffled Harry's jacket – or was it movement? The faint echo of a heartbeat thrumming in his chest. Harry's eyes opened just a fraction of an inch wider; he seemed to see Eggsy – really see him – for the first time. He drew in a breath.

"Eggsy," he said. There was such reverence and affection in it that Eggsy felt his heart turn over. Harry was alive, Harry was awake, Harry _knew_ him. 

He gave Harry his best cheeky grin. "Hope you ain't been waiting too long, mate."

Harry huffed out a laugh and then, without ceremony, he closed his hands around Eggsy's and pulled him close and kissed him.

It was a kiss like none other that Eggsy had ever received – it was an 'I'm not dead' kiss, a 'thank you for saving me' kiss, an 'I've been wanting to do this for a long time' kiss. It was the kind of kiss that left him breathless and tingling from head to toe, the kind of kiss he'd lain awake at night thinking of, barely daring to hope for. 

But he'd done no more than sigh and lean in when all at once Harry seemed to realize what he was doing. He broke the kiss and scrambled back half a step. Eggsy reached for him; Harry's eyes went wide and he blurted, "Oh, I do beg your par—"

Halfway through the last word he started to cough.

And coughed.

And coughed. 

It took Eggsy – preoccupied with figuring out the best way to say 'I don't mind you kissing me; in fact, let's do it again immediately' – far too long to realize that Harry wasn't going to be able to stop. 

He slapped Harry on the back a couple of times, lightly at first. Harry sucked in a short breath, but the reprieve lasted barely a second before the coughing resumed, and so Eggsy slapped him again, this time in earnest. Harry only shook his head and carried on coughing. He was starting to flush alarmingly, eyes watering. His hands were clenched into fists that rested on his thighs as he bent over, trying to suck in air. Eggsy thought wildly that he hadn't come all this way just to have Harry choke himself to death. He cast about the room for something, _anything_ to help. 

His eyes lit on the drinking fountain in the corner. 

It was the work of a moment to grab the nearest cup to hand from one of the shelves – a mug, actually, with a blue ribbon on it just like that stupid one of Merlin's – and stumble to the fountain to fill it halfway with water. Another two steps brought him back and he held the mug to Harry's lips, steadying him enough so that he could drink. 

A few sips were enough, and the coughing eased almost immediately. Harry paused long enough to breathe in, a slow inhale and exhale, and then sipped again until the water was gone. This time when he leaned back from the mug Eggsy lowered it to his side.

"Eggsy," Harry said hoarsely, and Eggsy kissed him before he could say anything else. He poured everything into it: his own long uncertainty and the desperate rush of relief at finding Harry at last, his hopes that they might have a relationship – friendship, at least – and the thrill of being kissed, of Harry's mouth against his own. It went on for quite a while, and Eggsy's sincerity must have got through somehow because Harry didn't pull away.

When they parted at last, Harry had a satisfyingly stunned look on his face. Eggsy grinned obnoxiously at him and Harry puffed out a laugh. He looked down and then started in surprise. "Is that—" 

Eggsy looked down too, still grinning, following Harry's gaze to the mug that was clasped loosely in his hand. 

Except… it wasn't a mug.

It was a goblet, gleaming with multicolored radiance even in the wan light of the fluorescent bulbs. It had no ornament, no jewels or carvings – just a smooth, endless sheen, curving into shape like it might still have been molten. It was cool against Eggsy's palm.

"The fuck?" he said. Because it hadn't been this, when he picked it up. It had been just a mug, just Merlin's mug, just something familiar, just something _there_. 

"How—" Eggsy cut off the sentence and whirled sideways to look at the shelf where the mug had been. It was empty – in fact, when he looked around wildly he found that all the shelves were empty and the tables that had once been piled high with cups and glasses were bare and dusty. He looked down at the goblet again. "How?" he said.

"You chose me," said a voice in the back of his head – not quite a whisper, not quite a shout. It was like Excalibur's voice had been that night: strong, triumphant, and yet somehow so old that Eggsy could almost feel the weight of the years pressing down on him. 

_But I didn't mean to!_ Eggsy thought. _I just wanted to help Harry!_

There was a pointed silence in his mind, and in that silence he suddenly remembered something Merlin had said about the grail, weeks ago now. That it wanted purity – not sexual purity. Spiritual purity. 

Perhaps wanting to help wasn't that far off.

"You chose me," the grail said again, sounding smug now and a little bit proud, as if Eggsy were a small dog who'd just managed to learn a new trick. And then the two voices, the grail's and the sword's, spoke in unison. " _Arthur_."

The word rang through Eggsy right down to his bones. 

It wasn't that he didn't know the sword had chosen him specifically. Of course he knew that – he'd pulled a bloody sword from a stone. But he hadn't _felt_ himself to be chosen. It just didn't make sense, not when there were so many other amazing people out there in the world. He'd kept thinking that there had to be some sort of mistake. He'd even started to wonder if this quest was really about finding Harry so that _Harry_ could be Arthur.

He couldn't think that now. 

The word – Arthur – carried with it a deep knowledge of what it meant to be chosen. There could be no doubt that Excalibur had chosen Eggsy for himself. No doubt that the sword and the grail wanted every part of him, his sense of responsibility and his capacity for love and his strength and his anger and his pride and his fear and his determination to overcome his pride and fear. They wanted Eggsy, just as he was. Not that he couldn't change – not that they wouldn't make him change, not that they hadn't _already_ changed him – but the changes were a part of him just like the rest. They wanted everything. Nothing more, nothing less. 

No one had ever wanted that before. Eggsy could have wept with the joy of it.

He could still feel the word fizzling in his fingertips when Harry spoke. "After all this time," he said softly. "It was right in front of me, wasn't it?" and Eggsy whipped his head up at the obvious pain in Harry's voice. 

"Harry—"

"It's all right," Harry said. He gave Eggsy a small, stiff smile. "I know it'll be in good hands with you, of course. Arthur. And if I come back—"

"Whadda you mean, _if_ you come back? Harry..."

"It's something you should think seriously about," Harry said. "Whether you'd want me back at Kingsman, that is. I don't know how much you know about the circumstances of my disappearance—"

"I know enough," Eggsy said.

"Then you ought to know that I abandoned my responsibilities," said Harry. He'd obviously been saving this up for weeks now, because he blurted it out all at once in a long stream of self-recriminations. "My judgment was seriously compromised. I let myself get obsessed with one idea to the exclusion of all else, and then in the end I didn't even achieve my goal. I wasted Kingsman resources. And beyond that, I was a complete arse."

Eggsy knew Harry wanted him to laugh at this last, but he couldn't find any humor in the situation. "Don't be an idiot," he said. "Of course I want you to come back. Yeah, okay, you fucked up a bit. Like any of the rest of us ain't done that? You meant well."

"It goes beyond fucking up, I'm afraid," Harry said. "I've had a lot of time to think over the past few months, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm fundamentally unfit for Kingsman." There was a terrible grief in his eyes; Eggsy could recognize it now, having seen it on Merlin's face and the faces of the others as they'd talked about Chester's betrayal. "I'm too old," Harry continued inexorably. "Too self-absorbed. Too ruthless. Too—" He cut himself off, but Eggsy already knew what the rest of that sentence was going to be. 'Too broken.'

Abruptly he was angry – angrier than he'd had the energy to be in a long time. He'd come this far, searched and wondered and worried and put himself through so much just to get here, and Harry wanted to throw it all away?

"That's a load of shite," Eggsy snarled. Harry started to shake his head in denial and Eggsy shoved the grail into his hands – and then let go, so that Harry had to fumble automatically to catch it before it dropped. When Harry's hands closed around it, he went abruptly still.

Eggsy couldn't hear what the grail said to Harry, but he didn't need to. Eventually Harry's shoulders sagged, and Eggsy felt the anger in his veins drain away at the look on Harry's face. It was weird to think of Harry – elegant, sophisticated Harry – as someone who needed the same things that Eggsy needed. But maybe that was just what made them both human.

"We all make mistakes sometimes," Eggsy said, as gently as he could. "We all get knotted up about shit. Fuck knows I've done plenty of that. But…" He struggled for the right words, trying to grasp at something that he knew was true but that he was only just beginning to understand. "It gets better if we work together." If he'd learned anything, he'd learned that much. "Kingsman needs you, Harry. Merlin and all them others, they need you. The world needs you." 

"The new Galahad—" Harry protested weakly.

"There ain't no new Galahad," Eggsy said. "Y'see, the thing is, they didn't want to give up on you."

He watched as Harry swallowed, but Harry didn't say anything more. And suddenly it was easy for Eggsy to know what to say. Because even though the grail and the sword had given him a new confidence, it was Harry who'd got him this far. "It ain't just them, you know. I wouldn't've got through those first few months without you and I don't know how I'm gonna make it through the next months, either. Not just 'cause you taught me what I needed to know. Not just 'cause I need someone to back me up when I finally decide to throw out half of the bullshit paperwork. But because you were my friend when I needed a friend. You _believed_ in me."

"Of course," Harry said simply. 

"Then shut the fuck up and let me believe in you, yeah?" Eggsy said. "Me and Merlin and the rest of us, and even Daisy who don't even know you but she knows you got compatible taste in home décor, that's for sure. All of us are right here. So stop bein' such a drama queen and come home."

It only occurred to him as the words were coming out of his mouth that this was the first time he'd said 'us' and 'home' and meant Kingsman by both words. But he couldn't dwell on that, not now, because Harry was looking at him with eyes wide and soft with wonder, and then Harry leaned in and kissed Eggsy again, hot and fierce and joyful. 

"Yes," Harry said, when the kiss ended. " _Yes_ , Eggsy. Take me home."

Eggsy held out a hand, and after a moment Harry loosed one hand from his grip on the grail and took it. His palm was warm and solid.

"Home."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who followed me on the ridiculous ride that was this fic. Special thanks go to Birdie, my brilliant and faithful beta reader, and also to Anna of Aza who prompted the idea that ran away with me in the first place. I hope you've enjoyed it. As always, you can find me shouting about Colin Firth's face [on tumblr](http://marginaliana.tumblr.com).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Idylls of the King](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11576361) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)




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